From Frankenstein to Marty Supreme, have film's prosthetic transformations become the key to winning Oscars?

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.

Even on the small screen, actors are vanishing entirely: Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise in IT: Welcome to Derry, Jamie Campbell Bower as the veiny, villainous Vecna in Stranger Things, and Walton Goggins once again proving why he earned an Emmy nomination for Fallout as the mutated Ghoul. Between them, not an inch of their own skin is on show. With accolades and acclaim piling up, is this proof that prosthetic-clad performances are finally getting the recognition they deserve?

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.”

For Elordi, Hill made the prosthetic pieces as fine as possible to ensure the actor’s expressions could still shine through.

“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.”

Shane Zander, who has been transforming Bill Skarsgård into demonic clown Pennywise for almost a decade, also praises the actor behind his prosthetics.

“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.

Sometimes, Zander says, he’ll be asked to eke out “more performance” from an actor, which might mean stripping down the prosthetics. “We’ll design pieces to achieve this, but actors still usually have to overcompensate with their facial movements.”

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.

Vecna’s transformation presented the same rare challenge as Frankenstein's Creature – demanding not only full-body prosthetic coverage, but also the flexibility and nuance necessary to preserve the actor’s performance.

“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.”

It’s intricate work. And as the marathon makeup sessions of Elordi and Campbell Bower make clear, these transformations are feats of endurance. In Hill’s recent BAFTA acceptance speech, he praised the “incredibly patient” Elordi. “Mate, we couldn’t have done it without you,” he added. But for actors, such ordeals have increasingly become a passport to the top tier of awards recognition. Long hours in the makeup chair are the new extreme weight loss or method-style commitment to character – strategies that Debra Birnbaum of awards season forecaster Gold Derby says “have traditionally always impressed voters”.

“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."

To completely hide yourself, then, is to put your acting skills to the ultimate test. Elordi has passed with flying colours – but there are plenty of other, more subtle prosthetics in the major acting categories this year. Amy Madigan’s work in Weapons, for example, saw her don a false nose, drooping earlobes and a single, beady contact lens. Originally, her character was to wear two lenses, but director Zach Cregger liked the off-putting asymmetry. Frankenstein had a similar story: Elordi complained that his second lens was uncomfortable, so he performed without it.

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.”

When the makeup designers on Sinners approached Patterson, they told her they were creating “a very different type of vampire film”. The experimental lenses seemed perfect. The only issue? “Because the pupil is completely covered, everyone was a little blind,” she says. Once again, the burden fell on the performer. In this case, Oscar nominee Michael B Jordan embraced the challenge. “He was especially excited to get the lenses in,” Patterson recalls. “Incredibly gracious, extremely professional – a pleasure to deal with.”

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.

Lyons has fitted everyone from Skarsgård’s Nosferatu to scores of on-screen undead, whether in 28 Years Later or The Last of Us. But even the smallest dental detail can alter a performance: the way an actor speaks, breathes, even holds their jaw. “We’ve done teeth on films where the actor hasn’t even told the director that he’s wearing teeth,” says Lyons. “Some of them love it, because it actually makes them work harder.

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.

“Consider, too, Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme,” adds Birnbaum. “Director Josh Safdie went to great lengths to hide his matinée idol looks behind pockmarked skin and Coke bottle glasses. Or Colin Farrell in The Penguin, who was unrecognisable and went on to sweep TV awards for his performance.

“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."

Lose your looks, then, and you might just earn a gong. There’s been a noticeable uptick in award nominations for such “uglification”: Demi Moore in The Substance, Brendan Fraser in The Whale – even Jessica Chastain in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, whose prosthetic applications, she claims, caused permanent skin damage (but also won her an Oscar).

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.”

Gower agrees. Since An American Werewolf in London won the first-ever Academy Award for Best Makeup in 1982, he says that prosthetics have become increasingly prevalent in awards season acting categories. “The most extensive, transformative makeups are those that catch the audiences’ eye,” he adds, “especially those that radically change the appearance of a well-known actor, such as Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill.”

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.

Maestro lost out to Poor Things, which featured Willem Dafoe as the deformed mad scientist Godwin Baxter – another of the many Oscar-recognised, prosthetic-driven performances in recent years. “As prosthetics have become more advanced,” says Birnbaum, “the ability to morph and adapt actors’ faces in ways both subtle and extensive has expanded the range of possibilities. And while filmmakers have a range of CGI tools available, it’s always more appealing to use realistic performances. Audiences have got savvier, as have voters.”

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”.

“And, in many ways, it was more exacting,” he adds, “because the audience knows that the Creature isn’t real. Claire had to fool the audience. They had to think she was a real person, but not Mia Goth. Ninety percent of the audience didn’t realise, and that was very rewarding. Audiences like to see the actor beneath the makeup, but they also like to be fooled.”

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.”

Gower also cites The Smashing Machine as one of the most technically skilful designs of this awards season – “It’s subtle, a great example of prosthetics” – as well as the “breakdown of [Chalamet’s] skin” in Marty Supreme. “There are some beautiful makeups this season,” he says.

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.

“We no longer ‘life-cast’, either,” he says, “which is the traditional process of using alginate and plaster bandage to create a mould of an actor’s head, which was quite a claustrophobic experience. We now 3D scan all our actors, a quick and accurate process, and use silicone, which gives us the ability to create incredibly realistic skin, thanks to its translucent qualities. Its flexibility and movement are also very lifelike, and we can pigment pieces to match actors’ skin tones perfectly.”

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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