Inside the Prosthetics for Robert Downey Jr.’s Multiple ‘The Sympathizer’ Roles

Robert Downey Jr.’s brilliant string of roles in A24’s “The Sympathizer” (streaming Sundays on HBO) is a tour de force reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ legendary turns in “Dr. Strangelove.” But Downey does Sellers one better by portraying four characters that serve as interconnected projections of American patriarchy to the Captain (Hoa Xuan Nguyen), a communist spy embedded in the South Vietnam army with a severe identity crisis. It was all part of an ingenious plan by director Park Chan-wook.

After the fall of Saigon, the Captain is forced to flee to the U.S. to continue his post-war mission. He winds up in L.A., where he continues interacting with Claude, a pop music-loving CIA operative, and his college mentor, Hammer, a gay East Asian studies professor who sponsors him. In addition, the Captain gets introduced to Ned Godwin, a military vet-turned-congressman, and Niko, a counter-culture film director, who hires him as a consultant for his Vietnam War epic (inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”).

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For prosthetics designer Vincent Van Dyke (owner of VVDFX and an Emmy winner for “Star Trek: Picard”), the prospect of transforming Downey into four characters was initially daunting. “The task here was to [establish] this baseline of Robert that was identifiable throughout the characters, and to keep this connection there that these are the same [actor],” Van Dyke told IndieWire.

But they were under the gun for time, and the looks needed to get established and tested very quickly. Luckily, Van Dyke had recently obtained a scan of Downey for another project. “So I took all of these sculptures and lined them up on a table in the front of my studio,” he said. “Everybody was there and I was gloved up and ready with clay and would start making those changes right then and there while director Park was making these notes. And by the end of the session, we were able to have sign off on each of those sculptural looks, so we could start testing the makeups in one day. I had never done that before.”

The makeup applications were done in an hour by two Emmy winners: prosthetics makeup artist Michael Mekash (“Stranger Things”) and key makeup FX artist Chris Burgoyne (“John Adams”). “I think one of the elements that’s so interesting about A24 projects is that they love to make the audience do a little work,” Mekash told IndieWire. “I kept thinking that Robert was getting to live out those fantasy roles he was doing in ‘Tropic Thunder.'”

Meanwhile, Katherine Kousakis (“Barry”) led the hair department. Her wig fittings took 15 minutes, made easier by Downey going bald for Hammer. “We had talked about maybe doing like some sort of male pattern baldness with the professor,” Kousakis told IndieWire. “But I just thought the look of a fully bald head was so striking that I was really hoping and pushing for that. And [Robert] was on board. So we would just shave his head down every single day for all characters and then build on that.”

Claude, the CIA Agent

“Claude was definitely the most difficult to nail down and evolved all the way up until the first couple of days of shooting,” said Van Dyke. “His very first initial tests were very different than where we ended up landing on him, with fire red hair that became ginger, lightening his eye color, giving him a cauliflower ear, and adding freckles.”

“We knew he had this kind of tough background,” Van Dyke added. “He may have gotten into some fights, he may have seen some shit. We talked about him maybe having a broken nose at one point that was reset, giving him a little bit more of a structured jaw…and we gave him muscular biceps. But, at the same time, he also had this kind of elegance and softness to him.”

Downey was given a nose piece that covered his whole bridge and then blended into his cheek slightly, and captured a little bit of nostril. He also had some jaw pieces on either side that gave him an asymmetrical look. He additionally had contact lenses, the complexion change, and a full lace wig.

“Robert came up with the idea of creating more of an angular face, and he was absolutely right,” Burgoyne told IndieWire.” He also came up with the idea of being quite freckled and was kind of looking at my freckling and wanted to go at least 50 percent more.”

The curly hair was Downey’s idea, inspired by the look of a friend. “We were pushing and pushing and pushing until we got such a weird, really far setback hairline,” Kousakis added.

Hammer, the Professor

For Hammer, they went with an older, rounder, weathered look. He’s got elongated ear lobes, a wide nose, large nostrils, and little eye bag pieces. Later additions included tea-stained teeth and a port wine stain on his head. “I started making some sculptural changes because I noticed that when Robert embodied this character, he would purse his lips together and it would cause a little compression,” Van Dyke said. “So I really wanted to play into that with these jowls to make sure it worked.”

There was also body padding and body modification pieces, and we get to see the character exposed and marred by a mysterious scar across his abdomen. “That’s where Robert, being a wonderful collaborator, was all for giving him this really big, gnarly scar,” Van Dyke added.

“Robert’s description of that scar was that he had a botched emergency surgery in some third-world country,” added Mekash.

Godwin, the Congressman

For Godwin, they wanted a clean-cut, quintessential politician look. Downey offered notes about him being from Orange County: charming on the surface but, basically, soulless and untrustworthy. “And so I thought: ‘Why not make his eyes dark brown? So much so that they almost read black in certain lighting conditions,'” said Van Dyke. “We ran with that and tried different variants of contact lenses. I thought it was very effective, along with the old-school political smile, and chiclet teeth.

His hair, meanwhile, was conservative with a standard part on the side. “We really only had to discuss the color, which we all agreed was gray, to make sure that it showed the age,” Kousakis said.

Then they came up with the idea of giving Godwin a burned hand from the Korean War. “It’s a great little detail that helps tell the story of this character,” Van Dyke added. “And so we did this top-of-the-hand burn prosthetic piece that gave him some really nice webbing and scarring that went up his fingers and all on the back of the hand.”

Niko, the Director

Niko, the hippie director with grandiose visions of making the ultimate Vietnam War film, was distinguished by a more subtle makeup design. While Downey appears to be channeling his director father, Robert Downey (“Putney Swope”), the visual model that came up early was Dustin Hoffman. “I wanted to him to have this kind of large, distinct nose and a mole, and olive skin, and we played around with different facial hair on him [giving him long sideburns],” Van Dyke said. “And we gave him a really nice hairy chest and then this loose, wild, curly brown hair. We wanted him to have this sex appeal.”

“I’m Greek on both sides and I always saw him with brown curly hair,” added Kousakis. “Lengthwise, we started [long] and then we brought it up so that we could show his ears. It’s going to be a little more trendy. Robert and I both thought that’s it.”

All Together Now

In Episode 3 (“Love It or Leave It”), all four characters appear together in a restaurant with the Captain. This was shot over three days in downtown L.A. with Downey performing two characters a day.

“Doing multiple characters on a day, it’s just a matter of switching as quickly as possible,” Kousakis said. “Getting all the glue off, cleaning them up, getting it back down. They would paint in up into his hairline, so you can’t touch any of the paint that they’ve just done.”

“It was an interesting setup and was quite fun, but another sidebar was that there were stand-ins playing the other characters during the restaurant scene,” Mekash added. “We kind of made them up a bit, too, just to have the essence of those characters. But because they had been watching Robert play the characters intermittently around the table, they all kind of took on some of his personalities just to give him something to work with when he was playing [opposite them].”

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