You Need to See Stephen Dorff’s Insane Transformation

You’ll be hard-pressed to see Stephen Dorff when you watch him playing a fictional country crooner in Wheeler.

To play the singer, Dorff basically got himself a brand-new face. He worked with American Horror Story makeup artist and prosthetics genius Christien Tinsley. Dorff met with Tinsley, played him a few of the songs he’d written, and got to work. “We did a head cast,” Dorff says. “They put this goop on your head and do a cast. Three weeks later there’s a mockup. They start doing makeup tests. First I looked like the caveman from a Geico commercial. My nose was too pointy. We had to pull this back. We had contacts, but they were very distracting and hard for me to see, so we lost the contacts. The pieces arrived. We put them on every day. We had a chin and a lip. They popped it on.”

Surely it wasn’t that simple, or remotely comfortable? “It was hard, but at the same time it was freeing. I didn’t feel like myself. The lip was the biggest challenge. I have this Ben Affleck butt-chin going on. I wanted that dimple chin. We got this chin piece to make his jaw different,” he tells Yahoo Style.

Plus, his changed up his mouth, which was no small feat given that singers sort of rely on their lips to belt out songs.

“Once I did the lip, which was the last thing, it really did help with my accent. It gave me this Southern thing that I liked. After I sing, it unseals because of the saliva. I’d look at my makeup guru and give him a signal and we’d run into the bathroom at the Bluebird and he’d seal me up,” says Dorff.

Physically transforming himself was liberating, says the actor, and helped him create the character — an aspiring country singer who moves from Texas to Nashville in pursuit of stardom — from the inside out. He calls the musician “my alter ego. My new little character. You do a movie and you leave it. This has stuck with me since the shooting. I’ve continued to write songs since last year. I’m really into it. I was tired of seeing these songs sitting on my iPad and not doing anything with them. And so we crafted this crazy idea. The songs came first. We wrote the character based on that.”

Dorff’s brother, Andrew, who recently passed away, was a lauded Nashville songwriter. And playing Wheeler Bryson, who performs in intimate showcases, was cathartic for Dorff. “It was my way of paying tribute to the world of songwriting, where I come from,” he says.

Plus, he now knows what actresses go through when they sit through hours in the hair and makeup trailer every morning.

“With this makeup, it was really uncomfortable. Women, you don’t need that much makeup. I was in the chair for three and a half hours,” says Dorff.

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