The Wrap

“I’m basically a storyteller, just with the skin on a character’s face,” explained Mike Marino, the prosthetics maestro whose reputation is fast becoming as lauded as movie makeup legends Rick Baker and Stan Winston.

At this year’s Golden Globes, Marino was acknowledged not once, but twice by winning actors on stage: First by Colin Farrell, who is unrecognizable in HBO’s “The Penguin”; and then by Sebastian Stan, who won for his role in the dark indie comedy about disfigurement and self-acceptance, “A Different Man.”

“That was a huge compliment,” Marino told TheWrap of the shoutouts. “People were texting me that night — producers and actors and heroes of mine like Rick Baker — joking, ‘These are the Marino Globes.’ I’ve been doing this for my whole life and I’m just super thankful and fortunate to do what I do. Prosthetics work isn’t the crazy, booming business it once was, but I’m following in the footsteps of my mentors and trying for greatness every single time, because that’s what I learned from them.”

For his work on “A Different Man,” Marino notched his third Oscar nomination in the makeup category (shared with David Presto and Crystal Jurado). His previous noms were for “Coming 2 America” (2021) and “The Batman” (2022), but “A Different Man” is in a whole other key – the lowest budget of Marino’s three nominated movies, by many millions, with a svelte shooting schedule of just 22 days.

Directed by Aaron Schimberg, the story follows Edward (Stan), a man with facial disfigurement whose insecurities worsen after he undergoes a treatment to improve his face. After the change, he meets Oswald (Adam Pearson), a warm, chatty Englishman with the same facial condition as pre-transformation Edward.

A few weeks before the film began production in 2022, Marino was contacted via text message by Stan, who is also an executive producer on the film, asking if the makeup artist could lend his prosthetic gifts. Marino, who is based in New York, where the movie would be filmed, was intrigued.

“I read the script and thought, ‘This is totally strange and original and I need to do this,’” he recalled. “We’re living in a time where everyone’s trying to look as perfect as possible, and this story actually has something to say about that. Edward goes through this metamorphosis, where he becomes a handsome guy like Sebastian Stan, but after he loses his face, he doesn’t know who he is.”

With Pearson as a blueprint (the actor, who made his film debut in Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin,” has neurofibromatosis), Marino crafted a three-piece silicone prosthetic for Stan’s character.

“In a previous era, it would have been seven or eight pieces, but the majority of this was one main piece, with also a tiny eyelid and a lower lip,” Marino shared. “And with Sebastian, we got it down to a two-hour application, once the hair and the eyebrows were glued on.” While not filming, Stan wore the makeup on the streets of New York City, both to test its credibility and to feel the reactions of passersby, a theme that the film handles with a mixture of poignancy and irony.

The story also called for several stages of makeup, as Edward is experiencing his facial transformation. For a scene in the bathroom, Marino paid homage to a moment from an 1980s ghost horror classic.

“Aaron, Sebastian and I, we’re super film geeks, and we watched that nightmare sequence in ‘Poltergeist’ where a guy in a mirror peels off part of his face. The funny thing is that for that movie, they only had one shot to get it right, so [screenwriter] Steven Spielberg stepped in and did the peeling himself. Those are his hands in the scene. For us, Sebastian had the responsibility to get it done just right, which he did perfectly.”

Marino also cited “The Elephant Man” as his favorite movie — the one that most determined the path of his life and career — and is grateful that critics and audiences have understood the ideas in “A Different Man” on similar terms.

“David Lynch captured the beauty and the humanity of Joseph Merrick in that film,” he said. “And I love the reactions to Adam’s performance in our film, which prove that people get it. People love Adam when they see him and talk to him, and it doesn’t matter what he looks like and all that superficial stuff.”

The history of movies, Marino mentioned, is notable for the contributions of makeup artists, as far back as Lon Chaney in the silent era and Jack Pierce, who worked on the original “Frankenstein.” Marino is an avid devotee of their efforts and even studied as a protégé under Oscar-winning makeup man Dick Smith (“The Godfather,” “The Exorcist,” “Amadeus”).

“I look at my work as who I am,” he said. “I’m not just a hired gun, which sometimes people want on their production. I have to be interested in the material and feel that it’s right, like with this movie. I love to approach a character and ask, ‘How did this person grow up? How do they live? What are they thinking?’ Makeup is storytelling.”