Note: For the screencaps in the gallery click here: The Process [Screen Captures]
Heading into work on A24’s A Different Man, a darkly comedic thriller for which he was both executive producer and star, Sebastian Stan had a problem.
He was “in dire need” of the best prosthetic makeup artist he could find, he recalls, without whom the project could very easily fall apart.
Written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, pic has Stan playing a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis, a condition causing facial disfigurement, who undergoes an experimental medical procedure to transform his appearance. The character, Edward, then adopts a new identity as Guy Moratz, claiming that his former self has died. As he navigates his new life, he becomes obsessed with an actor (Adam Pearson) of uncanny physical similarity to his former self, who is tapped to play him in a stage play based on his life.
During the early conceptualization of makeup for A Different Man, Stan’s first call was to Mike Marino, an Oscar- and Emmy-nominated master of his craft who, over the course of his career, has done thousands of makeups, most recently drawing rave reviews for his transformative work with Colin Farrell on HBO’s The Penguin.
The circumstances around the job were intense. Marino would have two months or less to prep, while working simultaneously on the fifth and final season of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the shoot itself would last just 22 days. But fortunately for Stan and Schimberg, the artist was so well versed in all kinds of makeups and production scenarios that he committed to the A24 film without a second thought.
When Marino read the script for A Different Man — a surreal meditation on identity, transformation, and self-acceptance — he was instantly drawn to its “strange…original and intriguing” qualities. He “thought it was saying something unique,” he tells Stan in today’s edition of The Process. “It wasn’t in your face, what it was saying or what it was doing, but that’s the best kind of art.”
The script reminded Marino of some of his favorite films, including The Fly and the works of Charlie Kaufman — not to mention The Elephant Man, which was particularly influential for him early in life. “Not that this film is similar to that,” Marino says, “but I feel that it has an echo of that, in some sense. It has the empathy of that. And I had to do it.”
For Marino, the process of crafting Stan’s prosthetics began with lifecasts taken of his face and that of Pearson — a frequent collaborator of Schimberg’s, who actually has neurofibromatosis. Scanned into a computer, these served as a foundation for Marino’s sculpture process, ahead of the processes of molding, casting, and painting the prosthetics. The final outcome was that Stan, as Edward, looked nearly identical to Pearson, while wearing just a handful of pieces of makeup.
One of the fundamental challenges of the project was ensuring that Stan’s performance would be able to come through, even behind layers of intensive makeup. “In this particular case, it’s rather thick of a sculpture and you’re not so much getting emotion through thick things like that,” Marino tells Stan. “But we did develop a silicone that was very lightweight and soft, and you were able to get very good expressions in it and drive the makeup through your own motions and things.”
Another big point of focus was Edward’s evolution from his original facial features to the visage he takes on following the medical experiment — one that ultimately mirrors Stan’s own. Transitional stages in this process were captured for the camera through the use of a material called methylcellulose, which allowed Stan to pull his face apart, à la Poltergeist.
Premiering at Sundance before screening in Berlin, where Stan won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, A Different Man was released in September and recently made the Oscars shortlist for Makeup and Hairstyling, also bringing Stan a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by a Male Actor – Musical or Comedy. Remarkably, it was the second he earned this year, the other being for another transformative turn as a young Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice.
Elsewhere in their chat on The Process, Stan and Marino turn to the subject of AI, as it pertains to makeup, with the latter expressing the belief that the technology will never be able to replicate the “soul” that comes with handmade work. Marino also delves into the history of prosthetics, lessons from makeup titans like Dick Smith and Rob Bottin, his recent work on The Penguin, and the timelessness achieved with certain classic makeups from decades past.
View the conversation above . A time-lapse video depicting the prosthetic application process on A Different Man, along with a couple of clips from the film, can be found below. (Site Note: go to the deadline link for the videos etc)