Zac Efron sent social media into a frenzy while sitting in the Dancing With the Stars audience and viewers couldn’t stop talking about how good his face looked.
On Tuesday night, the actor, 38, arrived to support his younger brother, Dylan, 33, who found himself at the bottom of the leaderboard with a total of 55 points for both of his dances.
Despite the low score, he still clinched a coveted spot in next week’s finale thanks to a surge of fan votes.
In a shocking twist, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Whitney Leavitt, 32, was eliminated even after earning near-perfect scores – leaving only Dylan, Jordan Chiles, Robert Irwin, Alix Earle and Elaine Hendrix still in the running for the Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy.
But the ballroom drama quickly took a backseat, because the internet had laser focus on Zac sitting in the audience.
The moment the cameras panned to the actor, Reddit and X lit up with commentary – with fans feverishly insisting he looked better, more natural and more like himself than he has in years.
‘Oh wow, Zac Efron is back,’ one fan announced, stunned by how much more like his old self he looked.
Another user remarked, ‘His jaw is looking proportional again,’ praising the return of his familiar facial structure.
A third viewer said, ‘I don’t know what he did, but his face doesn’t look as botoxy tonight – he looks great.’
A fourth fan agreed, writing, ‘He looks so much better than he has in a long time.’
Someone else added, ‘He looks so good now – he actually looks like Zac again.’
A commenter shared, ‘Zac Efron is so much hotter when people aren’t constantly barking about his jaw surgery.’
One fan gushed, ‘Zac Efron is so unbelievably hot tonight on Dancing With the Stars. I can’t stop looking at him.’
Another wrote, ‘Zac Efron looks insanely hot again. The world is healing.’
‘Zac Efron, welcome back, sir – goddamn,’ one person declared.
Another protective fan joked, ‘Everyone is thirsting over Zac Efron again? I think not – I never forgot how you all turned on my man. Stand back.’
The Daily Mail has reached out to Zac’s representatives for comment.
The renewed appreciation for his appearance comes over a decade after Zac suffered a horrific jaw injury.
In November 2013, he slipped on a pair of socks, fell, and smashed his chin into a granite fountain – an accident that resulted in him ‘shattering’ his jaw.
Efron later told Men’s Health in 2022 that he lost consciousness during the fall and woke up with ‘his chin bone hanging off his face.’
The trauma caused his masseter muscles, which sit along the inside of the jaw, to overcompensate, growing significantly in size and altering the shape of his face.
‘The masseters just grew. They just got really, really big,’ he explained.
The unintentional transformation fueled years of plastic surgery rumors, especially after his more angular jawline went viral in an April 2021 Earth Day video.
Zac revealed he didn’t even know he’d become a trending topic until his mother phoned to ask if he’d secretly undergone cosmetic work.
‘If I valued what other people thought of me to the extent that they may think I do,’ he told the magazine, ‘I definitely wouldn’t be able to do this work.’
Radio host Kyle Sandilands, a longtime friend, defended him at the time, saying Zac would never have plastic surgery – comparing his natural looks to a priceless painting.
‘It would be like getting a Picasso and having a kid finger-paint over it. Why bother?’ he said.
