performance

Prosthetics can turn people into anything, from the fantastical to just other real-life people. But the ways that makeup designers create pieces, especially to change a face, are really where the art of prosthetic makeup design comes in. So, the IndieWire Crafts team reached out to three award-winning makeup designers — Kazu Hiro, Mike Hill, and Dave Elsey — about the challenge of building new faces that still allow actors to perform through the silicon. 

While the process almost always starts these days with a 3D scan of an actor’s face and full mold, altering certain parts of a person’s face can create more dramatic changes than others. For instance, on “The Smashing Machine,” Kazu Hiro compared Dwayne Johnson to the real-life Mark Carr and came up with a couple of different options for director Benny Safdie — one that was slightly heavier to wear and more “picture accurate” to the real Carr and one that was that was more an “impression” of Carr that was lighter to wear and quicker to apply. For the latter, which is the prosthetics approach the team ended up going with, Hiro paid special attention to the browline. 

“Along the eyes, the shape of the eyes, the position of the eyebrows, that makes a big difference,” Hiro told IndieWire. “Sometimes if I put a nose on someone, it changes dramatically, but you can tell a person by eyes, because I think most of the time when people are looking at someone, they pay attention to the eyes, rather than other areas of the face.” 

So it was to the eyes and the brow that Hiro paid special attention on “The Smashing Machine.” He crafted a brow cover with a hollow core to slip over Johnson’s eyelid, creating a space in between the brow bone and the eyelid in the prosthetic piece. “If I put something there, the actor usually cannot blink because the rubber in the piece is stuck [on the eyelid]. So by having a hollow part inside, it almost works like a thin skin. He can blink in a natural way,” Hiro said. “I made that core digitally, on the computer, and then printed it out and stuck it on the mold, so that whenever the piece comes out, there’s a hollow in the back.” 

Just changing the browline helped Johnson look closer to the original Mark Carr’s age, too. “The piece changed his eyes a lot. That was the most important, because Dwayne’s eyes are really distinctive and quite different compared to Mark Carr. That’s also where age tends to show up, around the eyes,” Hiro said. “So by incorporating a design to cover that part helped to make [Johnson] look younger.” 

Mike Hill, prosthetics makeup designer for “Frankenstein,” had a different set of problems to solve with Jacob Elordi’s very new New Prometheus. He agreed with Hiro that changing a nose is where the most dramatic single-piece transformations can occur, but working with Elordi was much more about being strategic with the changes so that they’d play to the strengths of Elordi’s face and the sometimes childlike, sometimes vicious expressiveness he has as The Creature. 

In fact, when director Guillermo del Toro sent him a list of potential actors, Hill knew Elordi was the one as soon as he watched the first YouTube clip of Elordi he could find. “I could see him and just the way he held himself and his long limbs, his height, his big doe eyes, his strong jaw. I texted Guillermo right away and said, ‘Look, forget everything, this is our guy.’ Which was perfect because Guillermo had already made up his mind as well for it to be Jacob,” Hill told IndieWire. 

What drew Hill to Elordi was as much the flexibility of facial real estate as anything. “Jacob’s got such a strong, powerful chin that I didn’t have to put a chin on him, which is very good for me because chins are a pain in the ass,” Hill said. “Anybody with real estate where you can add a change — you know, I’ve got really small eyes so they don’t work for makeup. Jacob had the big eyes, the nose that was unassuming that I could alter, the strong chin. It was perfect, and a small head for the size of him.” 

Hill designed new cheeks, a new nose, a new forehead, new teeth, new eyes — enough to the point that Hill says it’s not really Elordi when you look at the creature. But he did sculpt the face directionally. “The scars make you look at the eyes, for Jacob. And then the scars are all done in such a way that when he smiles, they look natural and are not messing up his own anatomy,” Hill said. “He really made my life a hell of a lot easier than it could have been with other actors.” 

Dave Elsey, who has done creature and prosthetics design work on everything from the “Star Wars” prequels to “The Substance,” told IndieWire that, while each project has to be approached holistically and everything depends on the story and the characters, the fake nose is a classic way to make a big change on a face for a reason.   

“You only have to look at the Pink Panther films. Peter Sellers was constantly wearing false teeth and fake noses for his disguises. It’s played for comedy, but it proves the point. Just changing the profile, the length, shape, or tilt of the nose can completely alter someone’s identity. Hooked, wide, broken, squat, every variation tells a different story,” Elsey said. 

Sometimes a prosthetic head is meant to lose the actor completely, as in Mike Marino’s astonishing work with Colin Farrell on “The Penguin,” but designing prosthetics to recreate a real or recognizable face is usually a balancing act. 

“Every transformation is a collaboration: the sculpt, the paint, the bone structure, the performance. You can add weight, slim the face, lengthen it. Each change tells a different story, and that’s the fun of it,” Elsey said. “You build the character together, piece by piece, until they can live and breathe inside it. When that happens, when the actor disappears into the character but their performance still shines through, that’s when you know the makeup’s doing its job.”