Zac Efron Explains His Big Jaw: ‘The Masseters Just Grew’

Zac Efron was promoting Bill Nye’s “Earth Day Musical” on Facebook Watch in April 2021 when fans noticed he looked, well, a little different. Namely, his jaw looked a little different, sparking Tweeters and commenters across the web to wonder whether or not the High School Musical and Neighbors star had undergone a cosmetic procedure on his face.

Now, in a new Men’s Health cover story, the 34-year-old is setting the record straight on his large jaw: he was recovering from a grisly injury.

As Efron explains in the interview, the injury to his face came within a span of about a year-and-a-half in which he also tore his ACL, dislocated his shoulder, broke his wrist, and threw out his back. The facial injury was a pure accident, he says; he was running through his house in socks when he slipped, smacked his face on the granite corner of a fountain, and lost consciousness. When he woke up, he says, his chin bone was hanging off his face.

The actor says that he does physical therapy to rehabilitate this injury, but for a time he stopped; he also says that the muscles in the face work together “like a symphony,” so some of the masseter muscles in his face, which are used for chewing, had to compensate for the others not being at full health.

When he was spending time in Australia, he took time off from his facial physical therapy, and this was when he recorded the video for Bill Nye’s special. “The masseters just grew,” he says. “They just got really, really big.”

Efron didn’t even know that the size of his jaw had set the internet aflame until his own mother called to ask if he had gotten plastic surgery.

He doesn’t let that sort of online gossip bother him though—and says he wouldn’t have the career he does if it did. “If I valued what other people thought of me to the extent that they may think I do,” he adds, “I defnitely wouldn’t be able to do this work.”