Having been absent from the movie scene for a couple years following her last appearance as the shapeshifting Mystique in Dark Phoenix, Jennifer Lawrence is back for Adam McKay’s latest cinematic offering, Don’t Look Up. While the black comedy being released by Netflix is nowhere near the kind of visual effects spectacle that the last entry in 20th Century Fox’s X-Men film series, some digital wizardry was necessary for Don’t Look Up. Oddly enough, this included giving Lawrence a CGI tooth.
Why did the actress need this? Well, apparently before filming Don’t Look Up, Jennifer Lawrence lost one of her teeth while snacking on a lollipop. As she explained during her appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:
And I lost a tooth, like, pretty soon in the beginning. Eating a sucker, it was really stupid. It was a veneer. But if anybody knows what's underneath a veneer, it's much worse, it's like this pointy fang. And so, I lost that, and I couldn't go to the dentist because of COVID, so they just CG-ed my tooth.
Hey, when you’re trying to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, you need to be ready for the possibility that you’ll lose a tooth along the way. Joking aside, when Stephen Colbert inquired about if someone vaccinated could have come in to outfit Jennifer Lawrence with a fake tooth, she responded:
We didn't even discuss it, I was like, 'It's okay, I'll just do it like this, don't worry about me.' Nobody offered… Thank God for Netflix money!
Thank God indeed. If Don’t Look Up had been an independent production with a much smaller budget, either a portion of that money would have needed to be diverted towards paying for the fake tooth, or there’s the possibility Jennifer Lawrence would have needed to make peace with the fact that her character now had a gap in her teeth lineup. But when you’re making a star-studded movie for streaming giant Netflix, it’s easy enough for someone on the postproduction team to insert a digital tooth into Lawrence’s mouth, and no would have noticed if the actress hadn't brought it up on a talk show.
Jennifer Lawrence stars in Don’t Look Up as Dr. Kate Dibiasky, a low-level astronomer who works with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dr. Randall Mindy. The movie sees the duo going on a media tour to warn the world about a comet on a collision course with Earth. Unfortunately for them, they have trouble convincing people that the planet is in danger of being destroyed. Don’t Look Up’s cast also includes Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Rob Morgan, Cate Blanchett and Ron Perlman, among others.
Don’t Look Up begins its limited theatrical run tomorrow, December 10, and then it will premiere on Netflix December 24. Keep track of what else the streaming service has coming up for the remainder of the year with our December 2021 Netflix guide.
