How To Fix Your Own Teeth

When someone told Patricia Arquette to fix her teeth, she said 'no' — here's why

Conventional wisdom about looks in Hollywood is that if you're not perfect, you're out.

March 5, 2015, 3:05 PM UTC /Updated Feb. 21, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

/ Source : TODAY

Conventional wisdom about looks in Hollywood is that if you're not perfect, you're out.

But Patricia Arquette has upended that truism with her long resume in movies and TV and by winning an Oscar for her work in "Boyhood." That's because, while Arquette looks perfect to us, she has a distinctive flaw by Tinseltown standards: Her teeth are kind of crooked.

"I didn't want to have to change myself to be attractive," Arquette said. Getty Images file

And she knows it!

As Arquette told People in 2015, that when she was growing up, her teeth were the subject of conversations at home (her siblings are fellow actors Rosanna and David Arquette), and she told her parents she did not want to get to get braces.

Why? "It didn't feel like it would fit who I was inside," she said.

She even had the fortitude to tell a boy in her ninth-grade class something similar. He voted her "best looking," but said she should pay attention to her choppers so she could pose for Playboy.

"I said, 'Why would I want to be in Playboy?'" she recalled. "I just didn't want to look perfect. I didn't want to have to change myself to be attractive. I didn't think that was my responsibility."

Conversations about looks, the 49-year-old star noted, are often centered on women's, not men's appearances.

"I've had so many of these conversations in my life ... what I look like on film, what I don't look like on film," she said. "What are we supposed to look like? Men are not having these conversations. It's like we're trapped in wet wool or something. I just want to be free of it so we can move to the next level as equals."

Hear, hear!

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This story was originally published on March 5, 2015.