Fact check: Did Zac Efron get plastic surgery before A Family Affair?

Zac Efron was born on October 18, 1987, in Arroyo Grande, California. He started his career in 2003 with Melinda’s World and got a breakout role as Troy Bolton in the High School Musical trilogy in 2008.

He has played a range of characters, from lighthearted roles like in Neighbors in 2014 to darker roles as serial killer Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile in 2019. In 2021, he won a Daytime Emmy Award for hosting the Netflix travel show Down to Earth with Zac Efron. He was most recently seen in A Family Affair, along with Nicole Kidman.

In 2021, a video came out that made it seem like he might have had surgery to change his face because his jaw and face looked different.

People on the internet and in the news have talked about Zac getting plastic surgery. But Zac Efron has denied all these rumors and said that it is not the surgery but an injury, among other things, that changed how he looks.

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Zac Efron denies plastic surgery rumors, explains new look is because of other factors

Zac Efron explained that his new look was not because of any plastic surgery. In an interview in 2022 for the cover page of Men’s Health October Issue, he said that his face looked different because of an accident in 2013 when he hurt his jaw.

Zac was running in his socks at his home when he slipped and hit a fountain resulting in a broken jaw. He had to keep his jaw closed with wires, which made his jaw muscles get bigger.

“The masseters just grew, they just got really, really big.”

Zac Efron also opened up about having developed insomnia and depression during Baywatch's shooting.

“I started to develop insomnia and I fell into pretty bad depression for a long time.”

He added,

“Something about that experience burned me out. I had a really hard time re-centering.”

He also talked about taking diuretics (medicines that help to move extra fluid and salt out of the body), for the role of Matt Brody in Baywatch in 2017, which also added to the reasons for the changes in his looks.

"That Baywatch look, I don't know if that's really attainable. There's just too little water in the skin. Like, it's fake; it looks CGI'd. And that required Lasix, powerful diuretics, to achieve. So I don't need to do that. I much prefer to have an extra, you know, 2 to 3 percent body fat."

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Zac Efron recently starred in A Family Affair, a romantic comedy film directed by Richard LaGravenese and written by Carrie Solomon. The film also stars Nicole Kidman, Joey King, Liza Koshy, and Kathy Bates. The film was released through Netflix on June 28, 2024.