Few teeth are more iconic than Freddie Mercury’s, so when it came to designing the set of false teeth Rami Malek wore when he played the Queen singer in Bohemian Rhapsody, there was only one person to call: Chris Lyons, the tooth fairy of Hollywood. Getting them right was no simple task. Chris made over 20 sets before they reached the final one: “There’s a very fine line between real and caricature,” he says.
From creating the gnarled mouths of the infected in The Last of Us to filling Madonna’s signature tooth gap for the 1996 musical Evita – Chris has done it all. He is one of the founders of Fangs FX, the Buckinghamshire-based team of three that creates specialised teeth for film, television and theatre. “Excuse the pun, but we spread through word of mouth and now we’ve worked on about a thousand productions,” says Chris. Fangs FX’s recent projects include some of television’s biggest productions, such as the upcoming seasons of The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon, and the upcoming film, The Marvels.
“We were in the right place at the right time,” says Chris on the studio’s beginnings. He and his father worked as dental technicians in the eighties and were making false teeth for some 400 dentists around the country. The pivot into film was serendipitous, to say the least: “One of our dentists went out for a meal with a friend who was an optician and did all of the contact lenses for the film industry,” he says. The optician overheard there were problems with the false teeth on the set of Ridley Scott’s dark fantasy (and subsequent cult classic) Legend and recommended Chris. Through working on Legend, Chris and the team were introduced to makeup artists Peter Robb-King (who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on the film) and Nick Dudman, which was the start of a fruitful relationship: “They loved our work, and every time they got a job that needed teeth, we got it.”
Making a set of false teeth begins with Chris taking an impression of the client’s mouth using a material similar to putty. Then he pours dental plaster into the mould to create a copy of the actor’s teeth. If the client is abroad and not able to see Chris in person – although he has been flown out to Marrakech and New York for a mere few hours to work before – then he and his team can work from digital scans. For these scans, Chris is sent a file containing the client’s oral scan and Fangs FX can print models from it.
Missing teeth are an example of where visual effects can be used alongside Fangs FX’s work. To portray absent pearly whites – a “nightmare” according to Chris – Fangs FX uses a combination of blacking out teeth, clever camera angles and visual effects afterwards to tidy it up. “The problem with missing teeth is that they always want them at the front. It’s almost impossible,” he says. In these cases, Chris works closely with the director to figure out which angles and lighting will best compliment the blacked-out set of teeth and give the illusion of a toothless grin (or snarl).
Making teeth also requires negotiating with the bearers of the teeth, i.e. the Hollywood a-listers that Chris works with. This can be tricky. Meryl Streep did a pencil drawing of what she wanted for her role as the blue-haired witch with yellowed and jagged teeth in the musical-fairytale mashup Into the Woods. Chris told her: “I’ll make them, but you’ll look ridiculous.” He ended up making her two sets: one based on her design and another on what he and his team thought would work best. She went with the latter.
Fangs FX keeps most clients’ casts (an exact template of the actors’ teeth on which Chris builds his sets) for two years. However, he holds on to the bigger names for longer to allow for the creation of a new set quickly when needed. It usually takes two weeks to create a new set of teeth, but if Streep calls up (as she does every time she needs a new set for a role), it can be done within a day. But, Chris says the quicker the turnaround, the higher the price. It has been reported that a set from Fangs FX starts from around £800. The sets officially belong to the production company, but sometimes they mysteriously go missing – whether they slipped into the pocket of the actors as a memento remains unknown.
Despite all the big blockbuster films Chris has worked on and the stars he has gotten to know intimately as he fits and makes their teeth, he still sometimes finds himself awestruck: “I’m a little London bloke and I’m mixing with all these celebs,” he says. “And I find that quite bizarre sometimes.”