Prosthetics were once a novelty; now they’re a hallmark of a prestige project. Take Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein: 10 hours in the makeup chair, he emerged not just as a monster – but as an Oscar nominee.
Mike Hill brought Elordi’s Frankenstein Creature to life in all its blue-hued, monstrous glory, having previously collaborated with Guillermo del Toro on 2017’s The Shape of Water. That earlier work – creating the film’s “Amphibian Man” – didn’t earn him an Oscar nod. Frankenstein did. So how has the perception of his craft evolved over the past decade, and how does Hill ensure that the more he obscures a star, the more their performance comes into focus?
“Many years ago,” says Hill, “I learned from an interview with makeup artist Dick Smith [of The Exorcist and The Godfather] that you should sculpt your prosthetic appliance the way you like it, then scrape away as much as possible – so the piece moves with the actor, but doesn’t stiffen the face.”
“As far as why it’s getting so much acclaim,” he adds, “I think that’s literally the performance. Jacob really sold the character. He really used the makeup, but it was his acting that made the character so memorable.”
“Bill’s a trooper when we apply the makeup,” says Zander of the six-hour process, “and he really uses his facial features to bring the character to life." Skarsgård’s patience isn’t surprising – he endured similarly long shifts to become Nosferatu’s cadaverous Count Orlok.
The thinner the appliance, then, the bigger the performance. And while prosthetics have long been regarded as technical wizardry – impressive, transformative, but somewhat restrictive to performance – they’re now key to setting modern horror’s high bar.
On Stranger Things, Barrie Gower and four additional makeup artists spent seven hours each day applying 25 prosthetic pieces to Campbell Bower. The team carried out a series of “prosthetic pit stops," moving the actor from a seated position to standing, then to a massage table and finally a bar stool to attach each piece with precision.
“We’ve created some fantasy characters that are driven more by aesthetic shapes and forms rather than by the desire for the performer to emote through the prosthetics,” Zander explains, “especially if that character doesn’t have any dialogue."
For leading actors, however, the performance must almost always register through layers of medical-grade silicone – the material most commonly used for prosthetic appliances, alongside gelatine and foam latex. “All of which are very malleable on the skin,” says Gower. “The brief usually requires the actor to be able to perform unrestricted, but also be unrecognisable, so our makeups range from very subtle, thin transfer appliances like eye-bags, nasolabial folds [smile lines], noses and chins, to reasonably thick full-body pieces.”
“Consider Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, or Robert De Niro in Raging Bull,” says Birnbaum. “Voters have always looked for commitment to a role – and pushing yourself physically to extremes can be a way to stand out in a competitive field. But it’s no longer a guarantee of a nomination, and it’s not a shortcut. You also have to have acting chops, and a performance that stands out behind the makeup."
These lenses are just one piece of the prosthetic puzzle – and increasingly, it’s these hyper-specialised details that allow actors to disappear completely. Cristina Patterson, of Eye Ink FX, is the lens painter who created Elordi’s Frankenstein contacts – but her work on Sinners has also been widely nominated this year. “For five years, I had been working on what I call ‘colour-shifting lenses,’ which cover the eye in iridescence and go from glowy blue to purple,” she says. “They require a completely different process from hand-painting. It takes over a month to make these lenses.”
Such discomfort is rarely visible on screen. But that’s the point. Like ultra-thin facial appliances, prosthetic lenses and dental work are designed not to distract from performance, but to deepen it. Sinners also required custom teeth – another niche within the wider prosthetics field. Chris Lyons, of Fangs FX, has spent more than four decades designing teeth for film and television. “We only use proper medical-grade, dental materials,” says Lyons of his pieces, which pop in and out like a gum shield – secure enough for performance, but convincing enough for close-ups.
Unlike some of Lyons’s undead designs, Elordi’s reanimated Creature has only faintly discoloured teeth and receding gums – perhaps less monstrous than audiences might expect. And yet that restraint – the refusal to overwhelm the actor – is precisely what makes Elordi’s presence and performance awards-worthy.
That’s not to say his appearance hasn’t had its detractors. A BBC article deemed his Creature too attractive – “a catwalk-ready hunk.” But that hardly seems fair. After all, many of this awards season’s more nuanced prosthetics have also taken handsome stars and stripped away their good looks – all while retaining their humanity. Hill cites Sean Penn’s half-disfigured (and Oscar-nominated) face from One Battle After Another, designed by Arjen Tuiten, as his favourite prosthetic piece of the year.
“Being willing to be unattractive certainly helps an actor disappear into a role,” Birnbaum adds. “Remember the debate over Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose in The Hours? Sacrificing vanity for the sake of art lends authenticity to a performance, and that’s what voters are looking for."
Since 2017, when he first created Pennywise for It, Zander believes prosthetic-clad performances have come to command greater respect. While many of his contemporaries rightly praise the actors beneath the applications, Zander is equally keen to celebrate the skill and artistry of prosthetic designers and technicians.
“Prosthetic-heavy shows and even horror shows are being considered more these last few years,” he says of awards season representation. “And I don’t think it’s because prosthetics are becoming less restrictive, but possibly that they’re becoming more convincing, what with the advances in fabrication and application.”
Oldman’s Churchill, in Darkest Hour, won the actor his first Oscar in 2018. His comprehensive prosthetics were designed by Kazu Hiro, who has since carved out a niche recreating real-life people using makeup – and is once again Oscar-nominated this year for his work on The Smashing Machine, for which he turned Dwayne Johnson into MMA fighter Mark Kerr (Johnson’s performance, snubbed at the Oscars, was nominated for a Golden Globe). Hiro previously won an Oscar for his work on Bombshell, and was recently nominated for turning Bradley Cooper into Leonard Bernstein for Maestro.
Even Hill’s plaudits for Frankenstein, which have focused largely on his work with Elordi, tend to overlook his transformation of Mia Goth into Baroness Claire Frankenstein, her semi-secret second role of the film. It’s less showy work, he says, “but the steps and techniques are the same”.
True-to-life prosthetics, Gower also says, are trickier. “Likeness, character or ageing makeup is really difficult to pull off convincingly,” he explains. “Subtle, isolated pieces in the centre of an actor’s face are especially hard to disguise, and there’s a real art to it. You need to understand anatomy, and how the muscles in the face move.”
There’s a certain irony in that. As, for all the prestige and accolades, the majority of modern movie prosthetics still seem to have one primary aim: to shock and disturb. And there’s more of that to come. While creating fungus-ravaged zombies for The Last of Us, which will film its third series this year, Gower and his team grew mushrooms and 3D-scanned them to replicate their textures in silicone. It’s just one of many technological leaps the field has made since the turn of the millennium.
Such advancements may eventually trickle down to biopics and subtler appliances, but they almost always begin when a horror problem needs solving. As a genre, it’s the engine of invention – this year, it’s Frankenstein. But, before we see next awards season, Robert Eggers’s Werwulf will transform Aaron Taylor-Johnson, prosthetically and practically, into a wolfman. The Mike Flanagan-scripted Clayface will turn Tom Rhys Harries into a muddy, monstrous antihero. And another Skarsgård – Alexander – will be encased in prosthetic reeds for the unsettling Wicker.
It’s the same as it’s ever been, then – since An American Werewolf in London scooped that first makeup Oscar almost half a century ago. Only now, thanks to the artistry of the people behind the prosthetics, the actors brave enough to disappear beneath them are finally getting their due.
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