TV actor Peter Coonan has credited his missing front teeth with landing him the role of Fran in the award-winning drama Love/Hate. The 28-year-old plays gangster Fran in the popular RTE show and viewers saw the character get involved in a pub brawl where two of his teeth were knocked out; thanks to the actors previous dental injuries there was no need for elaborate make-up after the fight.
Coonan explained that ‘I had an incident when I was younger and I fell. I had an accident and smashed my teeth, so I’ve had a denture. On the first film I worked on, which is the reason I got the part on Love/Hate, I had my teeth out and… that’s how I got the audition for Fran.’ He went on to say that he was expecting the missing teeth to come into the show at some point, adding that ‘For every script for every season I was like ‘when is it coming?’, and then I saw the teeth [incident] in episode two.’
The actor also admitted that he was nervous about filming the fight scenes, commenting that he came round to the idea after considering dental treatment to replace the teeth; he said ‘it’s one of those things and I won’t have [the denture] for long because I’m going to get them fixed, so we may as well utilise it.’