Prosthetics, 3D Scans and Sculpting Helped Jared Leto, Lily James and More Transform This Emmys Season

variety.com:

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorHair and makeup artists are at it again, transforming actors into real-life characters. From the sublime to complete, Jared Leto, Jessica Biel, Lily James, Sebastian Stan and Renée Zellweger were among those being trans- formed and techniques including 3D scans of the artist are de rigueur now.Suits, enhancements and a lot of prosthetics went into helping actors disappear into their parts.Leto is no stranger to the art of transformation.

Last year, he vanished under layers of prosthetics to play Paolo Gucci in Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci.” For “WeCrashed” on Apple TV+, Leto worked with Kazu Hiro, who helped him become WeWorked founder Adam Neumann.Hiro, who has won Oscars for his makeup and hairstyling turn- ing Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for “Darkest Hour” and again for Charlize Theron into Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly for “Bombshell,” it’s all about sculpting techniques.

His challenge with Leto was that the actor’s face was rather different from Neumann’s.To play the businessman who convinced the world that his communal office-space company could be worth $47 billion, Leto was willing to spend two hours in the makeup chair daily.Hiro says, “I took a 3D scan of his face, and created a sculpture of his head cast to see where it goes.”Hiro and Leto went through different iterations and tests before the 90 days of filming. “Sometimes likeness makeup on someone would work well, but in this case, it wasn’t close enough to do something subtle.

It was almost too much,” Hiro says. “Then we talked about cutting things down in the simplest way.”A nose piece, contact lenses and a darker skin tone all went into Leto’s transformation.