‘When You Get Famous, Are You Gonna Fix Your Teeth?’

Joel Kim Booster possesses something increasingly rare in Hollywood: an imperfect set of teeth. Booster is a successful comedian and actor, known for being quick-witted and sexually open in his work — and also, importantly, for being hot. Compared to his perfect, chicken-smoothie-wrought abs, the teeth stand out. The top row is fairly straight, just without the unnatural white hue of a modern Marvel star; the bottom row goes helter-skelter. Offline, offstage, and outside L.A., they look normal, but as his fame grows, Booster’s teeth become a point of contention.

It’s long been true that, for anyone in Hollywood past a certain fame threshold, there’s increased pressure surrounding physical appearance. Much of that is subjective: how well your face is shaped, how good your body looks, whether you have the right hair color or style. But teeth are objective. They’re straight or they’re crooked; they’re white or they’re not. Often, celebrities choose to have their teeth fixed, usually by getting veneers. But not Booster — at least not yet. “I love when people ask me when I’m going to fix my teeth,” the comedian tweeted on June 19. “Extremely normal behavior. And quite honestly if I did, it would almost make me too powerful.” In a recent interview, we asked Booster for his deepest thoughts on his own (perfectly fine) teeth and how these thoughts have evolved as he’s continued his mainstream rise. Below is an edited version from the interview.

It’s one of the first things people expect you to do when you come into money or success or fame: Get your teeth fucking fixed. It’s “All-Stars teeth” on Drag Race, when the queens come back with new teeth: It is such a status thing and such a marker of economic security to have good teeth.

It was the weekend that Instagram released the Q&A feature on Stories. I had already moved to L.A. at this point and was coming back from a Fire Island trip. I was in an Airbnb in New York City, and I remember the question: Someone straight up asked me, “When you get famous, are you gonna fix your teeth?” It was the first time someone had clocked me for having bad teeth. At that point in my career, I didn’t necessarily have the means to address it. My response was simply “No.” And I internalized that response to such a degree in the years since that, as I’ve become more and more successful, I sort of put off addressing any dental work.

Listen, I smoked for seven years. I drink soda every day. My teeth are not as white as they could be. For so long, I didn’t have dental insurance. And even if you do have insurance, any work beyond a cleaning is a lot out of pocket. So I avoided the dentist for a big stretch of my late 20s to early 30s. I saw the dentist maybe once when I lived in Chicago right after college. I’ve seen the dentist maybe ten times over the past ten years, and most of that is recent. Growing up, we were pretty good about seeing the dentist regularly, but orthodontics was a whole different thing. My brother and my sister both had braces, but by the time it got to me, I don’t think we could afford them — especially for my teeth, which are not that fucked up. For us, it was more economics than it was anything else: He doesn’t really need it. It might become a problem as he gets older, but for now, it’s not worth the money to address.

I’m left now with these fully jagged bottom-row teeth. My bottom teeth are fucked up. It’s not top of mind all the time, but as I’ve been on television for the past five years or so, I’ve learned from watching myself onscreen what I can and can’t do. I specifically talk in a different way to not reveal the bottom row of my teeth. It’s literally about removing certain faces from my repertoire. The most base example of this is that I won’t do: [Contorts face into a disgusted wince that shows his bottom teeth.] I’ll be like: [Keeps mouth shut and looks concerned.] When I talk, I maintain my bottom-lip position like I’m giving head, hiding my bottom teeth a little bit at all times when I’m talking. It’s not something I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time focused on. I’m not sitting in front of the mirror and practicing. But it’s always in the back of my mind.

Comments have trickled in more and more the broader my platform has gotten. I did some stupid video interview where we were talking about blowjob technique, and the comments lit up about “I’m not taking blowjob advice from Mileena,” a character from Mortal Kombat who has famously fucked-up teeth. It is what it is. At this point, all you can really do is laugh, because if you put an insecurity out there, you are setting yourself up for people to try to make you feel better in a way that is really misguided.

My tweet wasn’t me fishing for compliments. The whole idea of me being hot and centering my own attractiveness was creatively and comedically very interesting five or six years ago, when I think there was less of an understanding about the desirability politics of Asian men. Plus, I was less hot, so there was an element of the audience not buying it. I would play with that. Now that I’m more well-known, and the conversation around desiring Asian men has moved forward a bit, it’s not an interesting avenue to address comedically.

I have done teeth whitening. It didn’t really help that much. I thought whitening would be different than working out, because “the way your body looks” is so subjective, but whitening is an objective value. Your teeth will be whiter. I thought it would be comforting in some way, but it wasn’t. I always do these things that I think will alter the way I feel about myself, and it just never does. It’s such a moving target. Making my teeth conform to objective standards of “straightness” and “whiteness” doesn’t ultimately add up to anything you can hold on to in terms of your self-esteem. Getting my teeth whitened and spending all that money made me even less inclined to get veneers. That was my thing I was gonna do “when I had money.”

Getting veneers is a lateral move, almost. It’s not that you’ve fixed your teeth, you’ve just gotten veneers. It’s a lose-lose scenario: You come on television, you have bad teeth, you get a little bit of success, then you get the veneers, and now people are dogging on you for having crazy-looking teeth. We want there to be an intrinsic punishment in the act of making yourself better by cheating: veneers, steroids, plastic surgery. With all of those things, there’s an undercurrent of people being like, Yeah, but you got there because you cheated or because you had money or because you had access, etc.

Maybe I will get veneers someday. I mean, my teeth are eroding because of the amount of soda that I drink. But the reason to keep your teeth, for me, is that it keeps one foot in and out of the system that we have created. A tiny bit of me is saying, No, I’m rejecting these beauty standards, and I’m going to live out loud with my bad teeth — which aren’t even that bad, by the way. It’s this trick of the mind: I am above the beauty standards and this game that we’ve all set the rules for ourselves for. Either way, it’s all a little bit of theater.