Eden is one of those 2025 movie releases that came and went too quickly when it was first released in August. But now that it’s available to watch with a Netflix subscription, a lot more people are getting a chance to check out the latest Ron Howard film. Which means it’s time to talk about Jude Law’s metal teeth.
When CinemaBlend spoke to Jude Law and Ron Howard via Zoom back in August, the British actor shared details about portraying Dr. Friedrich Ritter, who was a German physician and naturalist who really moved to Galapagos with his partner to escape society. Law said this about wearing the metal teeth for the role:
They weren’t very pleasant to wear. They were uncomfortable. But, you know, that’s all part of it. The sweat and the spiders as we’ve mentioned, and the metal teeth. I mean, that was all part of it.
Eden was shot completely outdoors in Australia with the likes of Vanessa Kirby, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas and Daniel Brühl. (At one point, a poisonous spider landed right on Sweeney, but the dogs were apparently a lot nicer to her than they were in that birthing scene!) Law went more in-depth about how the look of the metal teeth in the movie were decided on in our conversation with these words:
There were months of discussions about the teeth. So the whole history of the teeth is absolutely accurate. This man, he was a doctor, and he decided that for health reasons, it would be more practical to extract his own teeth before he embarked on this extraordinary journey. So yeah, we had to work out a way to make my own teeth disappear, and then we had to work out a way of putting in these extraordinary metal teeth. There are no existing photographs of it. And there’s a lot of footage, incredible footage taken by Hancock, which you can go online and see, and lots of photos of all these parties, but none in great detail of the teeth.
Ritter and his lover Dore Strauch (played by Kirby) decided to abandon civilization back in 1929. As the movie shows and Law confirms, the doctor decided that removing all of his teeth and replacing them with metal ones would help him survive outside of civilization the best, and therefore it was an important detail about the character for him to adopt. As he continued:
[Laughs] I remember sharing emails with Ron with these drawings saying, ‘Hmm, too well manufactured’ or ‘too science fiction’ or ‘too scary’. We had to get it just right.
Ron Howard added that another note they exchanged was one iteration of the metal teeth being “too James Bond” as well. Despite all the work, and pain that went into Law’s metal teeth, the actor loved being outdoors so much for the shoot that Howard had to tell him “you can’t actually live out here on set – the insurance company will not allow it.”
Eden earned a mixed to positive response from critics when it came out over the summer. You can check out our Eden review, which gave the film 3.5 out of 5 stars for being “another strong and character-driven work” from Howard. The movie just landed on Netflix, and is trending among the top ten. You can also rent/buy the historical drama on Amazon.
