While some productions turn to CGI, others rely on incredibly talented make-up artists and prosthetics experts to work their magic and add on the decades.
Here, Jason Collins, head of make-up effects company Autonomous FX, explains the painstaking process behind ageing up an actor.
Making magic
When I was 12 my mother took me to a magic store in Los Angeles where I found a book about make-up effects. It felt like actual magic! That led to me setting up my own company, Autonomous FX, 20 years ago. Now I perform magic tricks every day. Such as making Joel Kinnaman look 80 years old!
One small step for man
The key was not pushing the aging too far too quickly. Otherwise you leave yourself nowhere to go in later seasons. In season 3 we started introducing subtle aging across the cast — wrinkles, thinning hair, small prosthetic pieces.
Interestingly, some viewers thought the characters weren’t aging enough, even though many of them were already wearing several prosthetic appliances! By the time we reached the latest season, Joel Kinnaman’s astronaut character Ed had to be in his early eighties, which meant a much bigger transformation.
He has a very pronounced jaw line and cheek bones, so I built off those and created hollows in his cheeks because I know he’s going to age there. I didn’t put a lot of weight below his chin because Joel is tall and lean. He’s not going to have a lot of sagging.
Mould to fit
Once we like the sculpt, we cut it into smaller sections. You can’t apply one big piece or it looks like a mask. Real skin moves, so breaking it up – the forehead, cheeks, neck wrap, chin and so on – lets the prosthetics move naturally around the eyes and mouth.
The pieces are designed as overlapping appliances. For example, the cheeks and neck go on first, and the other pieces are built to sit over them seamlessly.
For realism, we even hand-punch individual hairs into the prosthetic hairline, so you can see scalp through them, and then the wig starts further back.
More than meets the eye
One of the things I consider when ageing up an actor is that you never want to lose their face in the make-up. The audience have to see that it is still them!
We often try to dull down the eyes, for example, when ageing up because as people age the outer edges of their iris start to fade. But Joel has these intense, piercing eyes and you don’t want to cover them up and take away from that, because that's his relationship to the audience.
It is an intimate, collaborative process. We are literally inches from each other’s faces! And Joel will let us know if something doesn’t look right. By the final week, he can probably do it himself. He’ll say, ‘Oh, this is too close to the eye today,’ or ‘I think we have the hairline slightly too far back’.
An old head on young shoulders
I remember when we first did it, he looked in the mirror. He was like, ‘this is insane! This is trippy, man! I can really move in it and express myself.’
I don't know if we all want to be reminded that that's how we're going to look as we get older. But you do need to make them look like themselves so they can really grab onto that really. The trick is to get the illusion to be as perfect as it can be. It has to look like we’ve transplanted Joel 30 or 40 years into the future.
Some actors fall asleep, but Joel mostly passed the time looking at his phone. Sometimes I have to ask him to put it down for a minute because I need him to look up!
The power of prosthetics
Acting is about the energy between people on set and those small, spontaneous moments that happen during a scene. AI, by comparison, struggles to capture the little human details that make a performance feel truly alive!
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