Colm O'Regan: Some stars are the molar opposite of bland or forgettable

Colm O'Regan: "In a time of inclusivity on TV, along with hairy backs, crooked teeth seem to be the final frontier. There are so few non-straight non-white teeth." Picture: Chani Anderson

Nat Faxon is not a name I thought I’d be writing about. It is the most American name ever. From the family of patriotic monosyllabics, Nat, Ched, Hank, Skip, Chuck, Honk, Bink, Clank. A name of a 1990s golfer known for colourful trousers.

But right now he’s sort of my hero. He’s the romantic lead of Apple TV show Loot, about a billionaire divorcée who falls for an ordinary Joe.

He’s my hero because of his teeth. They are… and brace yourself… not perfect. American teeth are frequently like American Midwest states. All the same size, perfectly straight lines between them, and very white. For reference, my teeth are more like countries after the fall of an empire — independent, run-down, bloodshed on the borders.

That’s why Nat Faxon stands out. He has crooked front teeth. If ever there was a name of a man who had perfect teeth, it would be Nat Faxon. To be clear, his teeth are perfectly fine. He would have had the fifth-best teeth in Ireland for most of our history up until the early 2000s.

But if you google Nat Faxon, the second result that comes up in the suggested answers is ‘Nat Faxon teeth’. He been in rakes of TV shows, written others, he has won an Oscar for writing The Descendants. And still people fixate on his teeth.

In a time of inclusivity on TV, along with hairy backs, crooked teeth seem to be the final frontier. There are so few non-straight non-white teeth. Not even a bit of magnolia. Once you go searching for stars with teeth they pop out of the woodwork. Mainly for toothy gaps. Madonna, Elijah Wood, Anna Paquin, Woody Harrelson. But the toothy gaps are generally seen as the acceptable face of imperfect teeth. It’s cute. It’s a feature. And there’s probably a quota. But good old-fashioned bockety teeth are rarer. Kirsten Dunst has a good set of ‘naturals’. And slowly the obsession seems to be breaking them down. The barriers, not the teeth.

Actor Steve Buscemi arrives for the premiere of HBO's television series "Boardwalk Empire" Season 4 in New York, September 3, 2013.

Aimee Lou Wood from Sex Education and The White Lotus made a decision in 2020 to just go for it and leave her teeth alone and in fact highlight them. And it’s worked out. They are good old-fashioned sticky-out-in-fronty teeth. And she looks great.

The king of them all is Steve Buscemi. He famously said a cosmetic dentist had offered to fix his teeth but declined as it would actually cost him work at this stage. Because he has sort of played the flawed, often downright crooked, anti-hero or hero-adjacent throughout his career. If he got his teeth done, he simply wouldn’t be believable. He’d be Brad Buscemi.

Why are we so troubled by crooked teeth?

I have them. I may have been born too early for free braces and we didn’t have the money for paid ones. So they remain as they always were... sticky-outy and crooked. And I’ll leave them like that.

I like to measure the overbite with an apple. Please tell me I’m not the only one who does that.

But even I find it hard to look at crooked teeth on TV. Is it the sheer scarcity of them? For years, a winning smile has been a sign of health, wealth, success, and discipline. Crooked, discoloured teeth seem associated with bad living and untrustworthiness on TV.

Ironically, hundreds of years ago it was the poor who had better teeth because they didn’t have access to sugar. In Tudor times, women would blacken their teeth to look rich. In fact, teeth blackening was a beauty treatment that goes back much farther than teeth whitening. In Japan, India, Southeast Asia, teeth blackening was done to differentiate humans from the savage white teeth of animals.

It’ll be a while before we see that on TV, though.