How Christian Bale became Dick Cheney: the invisible art of Hollywood's prosthetics masters

On the sets of his 1970s monster movies, Rick Baker used to tell his assistants to enjoy themselves, because their job would only be around for another ten years at most. Baker is the now-retired special makeup effects designer whose work on films such as Videodrome and An American Werewolf in London set a new gold standard for his craft.

He had learnt from Dick Smith, the so-called Godfather of Makeup, whose home-made latex prosthetics had revolutionised the business in the previous decade: Brando’s jowls in The Godfather were his (hence the nickname), as were Linda Blair’s flayed cheeks and stony eyes in The Exorcist.

But Baker had been watching the rise of computer graphics with interest – in 1976, the very first entirely digital hand and face made their Hollywood debut, in Richard T Heffron’s Futureworld – and he had begun to suspect the days of stick-on rubber were numbered.

One of Baker’s assistants back then was Greg Cannom, whose subsequent four-decades-and-counting career suggests his mentor’s outlook was a little pessimistic. Cannom’s latest project arrives in cinemas later this month: in the satirical biopic Vice, he turned Christian Bale into Dick Cheney, using some of the tricks pioneered by Smith and Baker almost half a century back.

Yet Bale’s Cheney-fication, and a few other recent transformations, hit a standard of seamlessness that feels like something very new. Think also of John C Reilly and Steve Coogan’s Laurel and Hardy in the just-released Stan & Ollie, Margot Robbie's pinched features in Mary Queen of Scotts, or Tilda Swinton’s age boost and sex change in Suspiria. Then there was Gary Oldman’s metamorphosis into Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour last year, which took one Oscar for the performance, and another for the makeup that abetted it.

This new golden age of prosthetics is the result of a flurry of innovations in the last 10 years – a response in part to the rise of digital cameras, which are far less forgiving in close-up than old-fashioned film stock.

“When I started with Rick in the late 70s, I remember being shocked at how heavy-handed some of his makeup looked on set,” Cannom says on the phone from Los Angeles. “Then when I saw how beautifully it came out in the theatre, I realised you could get away with murder.”

But 30 years later, when working on David Fincher’s overwhelmingly digital The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Cannom recalls feeling “scared to death”. Fortunately, he had a trick up his sleeve: a new kind of modified silicone he and Wesley Wofford had developed that would hold up under digital scrutiny. Like skin, it was translucent, and could itself be made up – and rather than crumpling or buckling like latex, it stretched and moved naturally with the actor’s own face.

Until the mid-1990s, silicone was unheard-of in Hollywood – outside the plastic surgeon’s clinic, at least. Latex and foam rubber were as far as things had advanced since the 1930s, when Jack Pierce had sculpted Frankenstein’s forehead in cotton coated with a hard-setting compound called collodion. These were fine for monsters and gore, but less convincing for ordinary faces, particularly up close.

But at an industry convention in 1997, the Canadian makeup artist Gordon Smith unveiled a much-longed-for alternative. Over 25 years, he had developed a substance he called ‘Smith’s Prosthetic Deadener’, which turned silicone gel into a soft, mouldable solid that didn’t perish or melt under studio lights.  The first film to benefit from Smith’s creation was Bryan Singer’s X-Men, where it was used to produce the form-fitting, blue scaly bodysuit for Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique.

Cannom was in the audience that day, and remembers being stunned by the result: Smith had brought an ‘elderly woman’ on stage, only to reveal she was actually a young actress wearing a full prosthetic rig. But he still had misgivings. Smith’s system created full-face appliances that could take up to eight hours to fit – and Cannom had learnt years earlier, almost by accident, that less could often be more.

In 1990, he had been asked by Steven Spielberg to age the then-56-year-old Maggie Smith by nearly 40 years to play Granny Wendy in Hook. But he only received Smith’s face cast three days before the work was due, and didn’t have time to create an entire mask. So he stuck to the essentials, and the result is one of the most convincing ageing effects from the pre-silicone era. That became a key feature of his and Wofford’s modified silicone: the individual parts could be as tiny and delicate as required, tweaking what was already there rather than disguising it.

Kazuhiro Tsuji agrees. The Japanese makeup artist was personally coaxed out of retirement by Gary Oldman to create his prosthetics for Darkest Hour, and he took a similar approach – starting with a full face and removing as much as possible until just the essence of Churchill remained.

He too had been apprenticed to Rick Baker, working under him on Men in Black, and had learnt over the years that heavy prosthetics which looked more accurate on a dummy could often “drown out” the subtleties of a performance.

“A lot of emotion happens around the eyes very delicately, and the muscles there don’t have enough strength to convincingly move fake eyelids or eye-bags,” says Tsuji on the phone from Burbank. “So I usually try to keep pieces in those areas to a minimum. Basically what we were doing is something impossible – suggesting a completely different skull and muscular structure underneath the face.  But if the actor understands, we can work together to make it look good.”

Tsuji and Cannom agree that Oldman is a dream collaborator: Cannom recalls him breezing into his office during the preparations for Ridley Scott’s Hannibal and asking “Right, is there a way of clamping my eye open?”. Unsurprisingly, Bale is another: Vice is his first experience with prosthetics, but as a serial transformer he took to them with glee, suggesting adjustments to Cannom – “he always wanted to go fatter with it” – in messages he’d jokingly sign as “Pain in the Ass.”

Yet many performers remain wary. Tsuji is currently working on the untitled Roger Ailes film about the downfall of the Fox News founder, and says John Lithgow, who plays Ailes, was initially reluctant to use lookalike prosthetics. “John had played Churchill without prosthetics on The Crown, and was really sceptical about having anything on his face,” Tsuji says. “But we had a meeting and we tried some things out, and he was amazed at how little he could feel the result.”

This creative push and pull seems important. Some of the least convincing prosthetics of recent years have been the work of stars’ own regular make-up artists, rather than specialists in the field: think Johnny Depp’s rubbery countenance in the crime thriller Black Mass, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s testicular mien in J Edgar.

Other high-profile failures have been the result of absurd expectations, such as the prosthetics in Cloud Atlas, which didn’t just attempt to alter the cast members’ ages, but also their genders and races.

This can be an ethical tightrope too: full marks to the Wachowskis for ambition, but when your method of visualising the transmigration of souls dredges up memories of Mickey Rooney’s yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, something has gone amiss.

Yet Cannom believes convincing race swaps are possible, and is consulting on a “very exciting” project in which prosthetics will be used for just that. The unsung part, he and Tsuji agree, is in the psychological boost it can give a performer. Tsuji gave Charlize Theron subtle prosthetics to play the newsreader Megyn Kelly on the Ailes film “because when she looked in the mirror, it helped her mentally become that person,” while Cannom recalls ageing Russell Crowe’s hands on A Beautiful Mind not just for the cameras, but because Crowe would stare at them to stay in character between takes.

“It has become a strange job,” Tsuji reflects. “This kind of work can only be truly successful if it’s invisible. The greatest accomplishment would be if no-one noticed it at all.”

Stan & Ollie is on release now; Vice is released on January 25

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