Zac Efron Is Unrecognizable In A Family Affair

Zac Efron's face looks different, and fans are not happy about his new appearance.

In the actor's newest project, the Netflix original film "A Family Affair," Zac Efron looks ... really different, according to audiences, thanks to changes in his jaw and face. "What happened to Zac Efron? He looks like an entirely different person," @PicturesFoIder wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter), accompanying the question with a clip from the film. User @amiescool noted that they only watched the movie to hyper-focus on Efron's mug: "I just saw Zac Efron's extreme new face and felt compelled to study it in more detail." @guiltyastiva mourned the actor's "former" face, writing, "i love zac efron, but he's starting to look like david [Hasselhoff]. like dude... you were gorgeous before and now your face looks weird," and @Miss_Luthor could barely focus on the film in the first place: "I am trying to watch 'A Family Affair' and I'm finding it so hard. What on earth did Zac Efron do to his face? I have tried but I can never get used to looking at it."

Efron has been famous for a long time, and audiences are pretty familiar with his face — which is to say that it's not surprising to see so many people commenting on it. Still, there's actually a darker story here ... and it has to do with long-standing injuries Efron still has to deal with to this day.

There's a story behind Zac Efron's facial transformation, and it all sounds pretty rough. As the actor told Men's Health in a 2022 profile, he's experienced a lot of injuries while bulking up and training for various roles, but the one that affected his facial features was when he broke his jaw running through his house in socks and slipped, crashing face-first into a granite fountain. As the outlet's interviewer Lauren Larson writes, "He lost consciousness, and when he woke up, he recalls, his chin bone was hanging off his face." The injury required extensive surgery, and, according to Efron, ultimately changed the shape of his jaw.

The injury particularly affected some of his jaw muscles, Efron told Larson; despite physical therapy, he told her that one muscle group got disproportionately large during his recovery. "The masseters just grew," he said, referring to a muscle that helps people chew. "They just got really, really big." Still, Efron has a healthy outlook on all of this. "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 said in the profile.

Some fans do know about this injury, like @Cynicity_, who bemoaned the knee-jerk reaction seen across X. "genuinely feel awful for the guy bc everyones commenting on his looks over the recent years but he broke his jaw," they wrote. "the healing process is gonna change ur face shape & ur face stays swollen & more square shaped for a longggg time during recovery."

Putting aside the issue of Zac Efron's jawline shift, what is "A Family Affair" even about? In this original Netflix romantic comedy, Zara Ford (Joey King) works for Efron's fictional Hollywood star Chris Cole, and she's tired of feeling as if he takes her and her hard work completely for granted. When she quits, Chris tries to lure her back with a better job as an assistant producer, but instead, he meets Zara's mother, screenwriter Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman) ... and the two hit it off. Obviously, when Chris and Brooke start dating, it causes an enormous issue where Zara is concerned, as she knows Chris so well that she definitely doesn't want him to date her mother.

Efron is reliably charming in the film, and despite the fact that fans think they've caught the actor out regarding potential plastic surgery, his career isn't slowing down. Presumably, they'll have to wait for his next film to see if his face shifts or changes again and take note, if they're this invested.

"A Family Affair" is streaming on Netflix now.