If Zac Efron's teeth looked a little funny in Netflix's new movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, you weren't imagining things. Zac had to wear false teeth to play serial killer Ted Bundy .
"The only thing we did is we put in false lower teeth to match Bundy's," director Joe Berlinger told Popsugar . "Bite mark evidence plays a role in how he was ultimately convicted, so I wanted the teeth to be similar." (FYI: Bundy had crooked lower teeth and a chipped incisor.)
Bundy's teeth were key in his trial because of one of his last victims, Lisa Levy. Bundy murdered Levy when he broke into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in 1978, according to ABC News . Bundy attacked four women there: Levy and Margaret Bowman, who were both killed, along with two others who escaped after being badly beaten.
"There was a double bite mark on [Levys] left buttock," author Ann Rule, wrote in her 1980 book about Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me: The True Crime Story of Ted Bundy. "Her killer had literally torn at her buttocks with his teeth, leaving four distinct rows of marks where those teeth had sunk in."
Rule also said a forensic odontologist would be able to match those bite marks to a suspects teeth as precisely as a fingerprint expert could identify the loops and whorls of a suspects fingers.
During Bundys first trial, forensic odontologist Richard Souviron testified. For evidence, Souviron matched up the bite marks on Levy's buttocks in a photograph to teeth impressions taken from Bundy after he was arrested. When Souviron put the two together, he said, per Oxygen , They line up exactly!
Those bite marks wound up being enough to help find Bundy guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder, and two counts of burglary.
Bundy was eventually executed, but before he died, he confessed to the murder of 30 women between 1974 and 1978, according to Newsweek , though many people believe the real number of people he killed was higher.