For All Mankind aged its 46-year-old star up by 40 years with a painstaking process – here's how they did it

Physical transformations for film and TV are becoming increasingly impressive, but ageing an actor to look decades older is still one of the trickiest feats to pull off convincingly.

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.

Now, one of the most impressive transformations in TV has seen 46-year-old Joel Kinnaman aged up to play 80-year-old veteran astronaut Ed Baldwin in the upcoming fifth season of Apple TV sci-fi For All Mankind.

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

One of the big challenges on For All Mankind is that the story jumps forward 10 to 12 years every season, so the characters have to age gradually across decades.

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.

Ageing-up

To make an actor look elderly, you have to study the ageing process. With Joel, we started by looking at his facial features and seeing where he was ageing. I looked at his nasolabial folds (smile lines), which are pronounced already. Joel is never going to be the guy that's going to sustain a lot of weight and a lot of gravity in his face.

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

To age Joel up, we started by having him come into my studio, where we took a three-dimensional scan of this head. From that scan, we can build a hydrocal bust – a plaster copy of his head – and begin to sculpt wrinkles and skin texture on it in clay.

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.

Skin deep

Once the moulds are ready, we inject them with silicone, which is great because it can be tinted and made slightly translucent so it reacts to light like real skin.

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.

We want a really convincing hairline with Joel, because we’ve established in season four that Edward is losing his hair. The mould-making alone takes about a month, and ideally the whole build takes six to eight weeks.

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.

Up close and personal

Once the prosthetics were made, we then had to apply them to Joel every morning in the make-up chair. He’d arrive, shave any overnight stubble, and we’d apply a barrier cream to protect the skin before attaching the prosthetics.

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

It is a surreal sight! At the end of the process, Joel is sitting there shirtless with the head of an 80-year-old man. He looked like Benjamin Button!

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.

Wake up call

There were about 40 shoot days for the new season, which meant that we did 40 sets of prosthetics. Applying them took about three hours every morning. Often, we’re starting at about four in the morning, so nobody really wants to talk to each other until they get a lot of coffee.

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

I’m not against AI. But prosthetic make-up gives actors something technology can’t: a physical transformation that feeds the performance. When actors spend hours becoming the character, it makes them fully present in the moment.

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!

For All Mankind season 5 will premiere on Apple TV on Friday 27 March 2026. Seasons 1-4 are available to stream on Apple TV, sign up now with a 7-day free trial.

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