When Poor Things hair, makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey began crafting the prosthetic looks for Willem Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter, her goal was not to make him look like a monster. Rather, she wanted him to look like there was a man underneath all the injuries that his father inflicted upon him with medical experiments when he was a child.
“It was one of the hardest things of the whole filming process for me because with Baxter, we were designing something that we hadn’t seen before,” Stacey tells THR. She worked with prosthetic artists Mark Coulier and Josh Weston for about a month on developing the mad scientist’s look. Once the team nailed down Baxter’s face the way director Yorgos Lanthimos had envisioned it, with five silicone pieces and a hair-punch piece around his ear, it would take about two hours and 40 minutes every day to get Dafoe ready for filming.
Emma Stone’s character, Bella, whom Baxter reanimates after her suicide by putting the brain of her unborn fetus in her head, does not wear makeup at the beginning of the film. It’s only when Bella is in Paris working at a brothel that she starts wearing it.
“It’s using her makeup as a storytelling tool rather than making someone look pretty,” explains Stacey. “It’s actually a huge part of the film for Bella. It’s a choice for her not to wear it because she’s a baby. Why would she be putting makeup on? She doesn’t know that.”
Stone also wears no wigs in the film. Stacey used Stone’s shoulder-length hair, died it black and wove in hair extensions. The length of the extensions would vary depending on which part of the movie they were filming that day. “We did shoot chronologically a lot of the time, but because the length varies, I had to have masses of hair hanging around the makeup trailer as they were getting longer and longer.”
Every night, after a head massage for Stone, who’d worn extensions all day, Stacey would send the actress home with her hair slightly damp and braided so that her hair had a “crinkle effect” for shooting the next day. “It helped to blend the pieces, and the Victorians actually did it a lot: They would sleep with their hair plaited, so it kind of is right.”
Of course, Stone’s character also bears a C-section scar as well as a neck scar from when her head was cut open, which were made with the use of prosthetics. But Stacey’s work wasn’t limited to Dafoe and Stone’s characters. She explains that there were masses of other prosthetics used on set. All the autopsy bodies were made from scratch, for example. Additionally, the other girls in the Paris brothel wore nipple prosthetics, and Kathryn Hunter’s character, Swiney, the brothel madam, was covered in full-body tattoos.
“That was quite a big operation,” Stacey says of Swiney’s tattoos. “It was like 100-and-something tattoos that were all individually designed for Swiney and applied individually.”
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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