Den­tal­ly chal­lenged – the art of cre­at­ing false teeth for the movies

You may not know the name but you will have seen the work. Gary Archer is an LA-based British expat who works as Hollywood’s go-to guy for mould­ing pros­thet­ic teeth. His com­mit­ment to qual­i­ty has allowed him to retain his stature with­in the indus­try for decades, and any job that involves teeth in any way, shape or form usu­al­ly finds its way to his door. He makes his own impres­sions with the sub­jects and has refused to suc­cumb to the shod­dy crafts­man­ship. Here, Archer tells the sto­ry of some of his most mar­vel­lous creations.

“I was born in Lon­don. I came over to the US in 1976 with my father. We end­ed up in this den­tal lab. I went to work for my dad in 1983 or ​’84, and I was with him… for­ev­er. He retired a few years back and I took over the lab and have worked there ever since. We start­ed doing film work in ​’94, ​’93, when­ev­er it was, and we’ve been going ever since. I appren­ticed for five years, learned how to be a den­tal tech­ni­cian and was quite hap­py being a den­tal technician.

“We were con­tact­ed by a make-up artist who was referred to us by one of our den­tists. They asked us if we could make a set of teeth that would fall out of somebody’s mouth and into a glass of water, and that was one of the first jobs we ever did. It was for Robin Williams in Mrs Doubt­fire. They liked what we did, they told some­one else, who told some­one else. I don’t real­ly have to adver­tise because my name is out there. It’s been out there for many, many years, and peo­ple just sort of find me.”

“Mak­ing fangs isn’t much dif­fer­ent to mak­ing nor­mal teeth. Every­thing is artic­u­lat­ed with moulds, so we know exact­ly how the patient’s jaw con­nects togeth­er. Then we make the fangs accord­ing­ly. They look good and can func­tion as fangs, and the actor can also speak with them. That’s the biggest thing – the tal­ent has to be able to speak and act. The key is mak­ing teeth that are com­fort­able and that they can work with. They mustn’t sud­den­ly have a speech impediment.

“Every­thing is done with den­tal artic­u­la­tors and den­tal mod­els, so we take all those impor­tant aspects into con­sid­er­a­tion. In terms of giv­ing safe­ty tips, obvi­ous­ly we say that these teeth are just for act­ing, they’re not for every­day run­ning around in, they’re not for eat­ing, any­thing like that. They are just for appearance.”

“I saw some­thing on the BBC web­site, I don’t know whether it was last year or this year, where they were talk­ing about quin­tes­sen­tial­ly bad British teeth. On the page they had a pic­ture of Austin Pow­ers. Some­one for­ward­ed that to me, and I said, I think I’m respon­si­ble for prop­a­gat­ing this myth about bad British teeth. When Mike Myers first came to me on this, he said, ​‘I want bad British 1960s teeth’. There’s an Eng­lish pub out here where I live in the Val­ley and a lot of Eng­lish expats are in there. And so I basi­cal­ly looked at a lot of the smiles from the clien­tele there.

“I just mod­elled Austin Pow­ers on two or three dif­fer­ent peo­ple that I used to drink with in this pub. I took pic­tures, I made sketch­es and then came up with a design. And straight away Mike loved it. He said that I’d absolute­ly nailed it. So we ran with it. He made those teeth famous. In the third movie, which is set in mod­ern times, he has his teeth all fixed up. Yet with­out the real, bad teeth in, he isn’t Austin Pow­ers. He’s just Mike Myers wear­ing a pair of glass­es and a colour­ful cos­tume, which isn’t the same. So they always made him go back in time, so he could have his bad British teeth again. They were inte­gral to the character.”

“Which teeth am I most proud of? All of them real­ly. The fangs for all of the major char­ac­ters in Inter­view with a Vam­pire would be one exam­ple. Teeth for Antho­ny Hop­kins in Nixon would be anoth­er. Mak­ing those was inter­est­ing. We used pic­tures of Nixon him­self as inspi­ra­tion. Hop­kins, along with the make-up peo­ple who designed the pros­thet­ics, described to me what his teeth looked like. His four front teeth were fair­ly white, his side teeth were fair­ly yellow.

“They want­ed to go ahead and match that, and I said that would be easy. And so we made the teeth for him. He liked them so much he would put them in and for­get that he was wear­ing them. He’d go off for lunch, would eat with them in and shat­ter them. And then he’d bring them back to me and say: ​‘I’m ter­ri­bly sor­ry Gary, I’ve bro­ken the teeth’, in that love­ly Welsh accent of his. And he’s a love­ly man. A love­ly, love­ly man.”

“I worked on Har­mo­ny Korine’s Spring Break­ers. It was for James Fran­co. We made some gold grills for him. They were actu­al­ly a met­al cast­ing. Usu­al­ly you use real gold, but the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny didn’t real­ly want to shell out $2,000 for an ounce of gold at that point, so what we used is anoth­er met­al that’s called NPG, which stands for non-pre­cious gold. It’s a gold coloured alloy, but when it’s cast and pol­ished it looked almost iden­ti­cal to gold. It just doesn’t have the prop­er­ties of real gold.”

“Jon­ah Hill, who stars in The Wolf of Wall Street, doesn’t have par­tic­u­lar­ly great or white teeth, but he want­ed to have these per­fect white veneers for this film. So we made him per­fect white, straight veneers. Blind­ing­ly white. All acrylic teeth come in dif­fer­ent colours. It’s the same acrylics that we use for nor­mal den­tures and things like that, so we just used the same mate­r­i­al and colours that are found in the den­tal indus­try. We try to stay away from paint and things like that because that type of stuff is not nec­es­sar­i­ly health-safe.”

“I recent­ly did a set for Matthew McConaugh­ey in Free State of Jones. He was wear­ing pros­thet­ic teeth in that film to make them look like they were not his own per­fect, white Hol­ly­wood set. That’s one of the prob­lems: all the Hol­ly­wood A‑listers have got absolute­ly per­fect teeth and they look way, way too per­fect to be believ­able. Espe­cial­ly if they’re play­ing a Civ­il War offi­cer in the 1860s. So what we have to do is make the teeth look reg­u­lar, make them look 1860s. If you look at the pic­tures, you can see that they look very un-Matthew McConaughey.”