Fans think Zac Efron may have referenced his real-life jaw injury in his new movie, A Family Affair.
In the Netflix comedy, which was released on Friday, June 28, Efron plays Chris Cole — a self-absorbed A-list actor who falls for his assistant Zara’s (Joey King) mom, Brooke, played by Nicole Kidman. As Chris and Brooke get to know one another early on in the film, Chris tells a story about his well-toned legs in hopes of impressing Brooke. He then gets candid, revealing that he has had one major surgery in his life: on his chin, after a hard fall on set.
“People thought that my quad [muscles] were completely fake. Like, that I got implants,” Chris tells Brooke in the film. “People magazine had a four page spread on my quad job. They called me the ‘quad father.’ It’s not that funny, actually, I had to sue them. But, they’re real.… I did have surgery though. Just right there [under my chin]. I fell on set onto some broken glass.”
Fans immediately drew a parallel from the scene to rumors swirled that Efron had undergone plastic surgery on his jaw after an April 2021 Facebook Watch video with Bill Nye. Efron eventually addressed the physical changes during an interview with Men’s Health the following year, revealing that he fell on a granite fountain while running in his home with socks on nearly 10 years prior, causing him to render unconscious. When he awoke, he realized that this chin bone was “hanging off his face.”
However, Efron denied that he had undergone any plastic surgery to fix the injury, instead opting for intense physical therapy. When he was forced to pause his recovery to film his Netflix series Down to Earth With Zac Efron in Australia, certain muscles in his face became enlarged as they compensated for the other injured muscles.
“The masseters just grew,” he told Men’s Health in September 2022. “They just got really, really big.” (Masseter muscles, which exist on both sides of the lower face and run from the temporal bone to the lower jaw, aid with chewing and eating, according to an article published by the National Institute of Health.)
Efron confessed that he wasn’t even aware of the social media rumors surrounding his jaw until his mother questioned him about it, but noted that he was unbothered by the online chatter.
“If I valued what other people thought of me to the extent that they may think I do. I definitely wouldn’t be able to do this work,” he told the outlet.
Later that same month, Efron once again opened up about the injury during an interview with Entertainment Tonight, where he revealed that the accident was nearly fatal.
“It was funny,” he said. “It sucks. I almost died, but we’re good.”
A Family Affair was filmed from August to October 2022s. It was also around the time Efron began prepping The Iron Claw, where he underwent a major physical transformation to play wrestler Kevin Von Erich. Efron reportedly gained 15 pounds of muscle for the role.
“In the best way possible, I did not look anything like me,” Efron told The Hollywood Reporter in December 2023. “It was jarring at first, but we kind of put it together piece by piece.”
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Whether Efron’s chin reference in A Family Affair was intentional is unclear, but the High School Musical star did seemingly poke fun at himself in other ways in the film — including how he once requested an ice bath from an assistant, something his character also does to Zara. During an interview with Parade earlier this month, Efron called it the “craziest” thing he’s asked of an assistant. “It was great,” he said. “I still have it.”
When asked if there were any other elements about Chris that he related to, Efron said it was “kind of a mix.”
“I think there are feelings that he’s experiencing that I’ve definitely felt myself at times, but I just kind of amplified some of the ways that I guess he’s more afraid of things,” he explained. “Unfortunately, when you’re going through some of those emotions, you can tend to take it out on the people closest to you, which he does to Zara. She’s probably his friend and there’s nobody he can really be himself in front of, and I think that shines a light on how wonderful their relationship is. It’s tumultuous at times, but Zara is always there for Chris and I think by the end of the movie, you see that Chris really has Zara’s back and it’s really special.”
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