Oscar-nominated makeup on display
BEVERLY HILLS — Cauliflower ears, an array of mustaches and a blue silicon suit are part of what earned the makeup teams from Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Guardians of the Galaxy, respectively, Academy Award nominations. The strange mix of body parts and hair accessories were on display at the Oscars Makeup and Hairstyling Symposium a day before Sunday's big show.
Before sharing the makeup pieces with the public, makeup artist Leonard Engelman (Ghostbusters, Burlesque) moderated a panel with the nominees: Bill Corso and Dennis Liddiard for Foxcatcher; Frances Hannon and Mark Coulier for The Grand Budapest Hotel; and Elisabeth Yianni-Georgiou and Davie White for Guardians of the Galaxy.
Some tidbits the teams shared:
Foxcatcher: Because Steve Carrell's John du Pont called himself a golden eagle, the artists wanted his profile to look like an eagle, hence the beaklike nose. To get into character, Corso explained, Carrell wore a set of dentures, plumpers to distort the shape of his mouth, fake lips, face paint, prosthetic eyebrows, contact lenses and a deep hairline.
Preparing makeup for brother wrestlers played by Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum was a challenge, because the actors had to fight with the prosthetics on. One time, Liddiard saw a prosthetic cauliflower ear fly during a wrestling scene.
The Grand Budapest Hotel: Tilda Swinton is the perfect person to age, because she has "such a fine bone structure," said Hannon. Her character, Madame D., is supposed to be 83 in the film. The actress wore eleven pieces for the movie, including two prosthetic hands, a cheek piece, a chin piece, a forehead piece, nose pieces and dangly earlobes. Director Wes Anderson wanted her to have loads of liver spots.
Tony Revolori's Zero painted on a mustache, partly because the actor couldn't grow one. In the movie, the character always wears a mustache when he's sharing a scene with Gustave.
Guardians of the Galaxy: The makeup artists needed to develop their own makeup for characters like the blue-skinned Yondu (Michael Rooker), because no other product allowed the actors to sweat. Then, the team found that their wig glue didn't work with the newly-created makeup, so they had to create their own glue, too.
Dave Bautista's Drax the Destroyer required 18 pieces and just under three hours to apply daily, as White explains in the video above. At the end of the day, each piece had to be discarded. That happened for about 69 days.