Deadline

When makeup designer Mike Marino signed on to do the prosthetics for A Different Man, he was taken in by the story’s ability to shine a comedic light on a dark subject. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s take on someone’s obsession of self then led Marino to an Oscar nomination for his prosthetic designs.

A Different Man follows Edward (Sebastian Stan), an aspiring actor, who undergoes a medical procedure to drastically change his appearance. When his new face gets in the way of the role he was born to play, he becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost. Marino looked to Adam Pearson for inspiration on what Edward’s initial prosthetics should look like, since the actors had to be playing off of each other, though Marino’s real craftsmanship came in the form of the “treatment stages” prosthetics.

DEADLINE: What was your inspiration for Edward’s prosthetics?

MIKE MARINO: The actual direct inspiration was Adam Pearson. Due to what we needed to do through the film, we had to have Sebastian look close to Adam Pearson, but a bit different. He was really the main influence with the design of the makeup because they’re playing against each other, so it wouldn’t really make sense if it looked completely different. It had to have the same feeling. So, I used Sebastian’s face to do what I could with his own face and his proportions, and mix them with Adam Pearson’s in a sense, but I had to actually make it a little bit more dramatic because his face is like Edward’s face in the film. Sebastian’s character is going through this kind of metamorphosis where he’s getting scabs and these pieces are peeling off of his face. So, it had to be altered from Adam Pearson’s face, which is not going through any of that stuff. Throughout the film, his face is getting scabby and lumpy and all these other things happening, and then he’s peeling pieces of it off, and then he ultimately peels his entire face off.

DEADLINE: Tell me about the stages of the prosthetics.

MARINO: So, there’s a few stages. His initial look is its own look in itself, and then when he starts going to treatments, he starts getting scabs and little pieces of things that are more intensified and flakier. And then you have this extremely soft version where his face almost looks like it’s melting off, which is the scene where he peels his face off and underneath is another stage of makeup. It’s a transitionary state between Edward’s final look as Guy, which he changes his name to, and Edward’s look. When he peels that off, underneath is another makeup he’s wearing that’s slightly distorting his facial features. If you look closely, you can kind of see remnants of the shape of what that character looks like. And then ultimately the next scene, he’s Sebastian Stan. He’s the new character.

That’s about four stages, and it was hard to make the very soft one. We barely could even take it out of our molds because it was just so pliable and so soft that it was barely holding its shape. And I had to do the makeup of his transitionary stage first and then glue with a very sticky gel, a very sticky material called Methylcellulose, which is basically a concentrated jelly donut filling. I had to glue the makeup on with that material so that it would kind of slough off and just peel and drip off. So then when he stretches it, it’s all this really stretchy cocoon-like shell going on. So that was definitely a tricky thing to even pull off.

DEADLINE: And what is that last prosthetic itself made out of? Is it a different material from the others that makes it so soft and difficult to work with?

MARINO: It’s all the same material. It’s just varied in density of silicone. There’re ways to vary the softness of things. Like for instance, on The Penguin, I made certain aspects of that makeup harder, like the nose. And there were aspects of Colin [Farrell]’s face, like the neck, which I made extremely soft because it’s such a mobile area. Same with this, there’s a couple of soft spots of Edward’s character, and then when he’s peeling his face off, it’s a much, much softer version of the same material. We can make it more liquid and do different things chemically to make it very pliable, but it’s all platinum, medical-grade silicone.