'Foxcatcher' Makeup Artists on Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo's Oscar-Nominated Transformations
It’s no mystery why Steve Carell’s makeup has received so much attention. The actor was practically unrecognizable in the drama Foxcatcher, thanks to remarkable work by makeup artist Bill Corso. Yet Foxcatcher’s Oscar nomination for Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling — which Corso shares with Dennis Liddiard — is actually being judged on all three lead actors: Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo. The transformation of Tatum and Ruffalo into Olympic wrestlers Mark and Dave Schultz was just as crucial to the film as that of Carell, who plays the brothers’ unhinged benefactor John du Pont. “Our director [Bennett Miller] was very adamant about the actors looking like they weren’t wearing makeup. He wanted the movie very au naturel,” says Corso. “And yet our three leads actually have quite a bit of makeup on, to make them look like they’re not wearing makeup.”
Watch the Foxcatcher trailer.
In addition to making the actors resemble their real-life counterparts, Corso (a previous Oscar winner for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) and Liddiard had to maintain their work throughout the film’s arduous wrestling scenes. “So [for example], we would spend all this time on Mark, painting his face to make him look totally natural as Dave Schultz, and then he would go to set and Channing would throw him in a headlock,” Corso recalls with a laugh. They also had the challenge of aging the actors ten years for the film’s final scenes, an adjustment so subtle that many viewers may not have noticed. Yahoo Movies spoke with Corso and Liddiard about how they achieved all three Foxcatcher stars’ Oscar-nominated looks.
Channing Tatum as Mark Schultz
Bill Corso specifically brought in Dennis Liddiard, who had worked with Channing Tatum on both Jump Street films, to talk care of Tatum’s makeup. The star was eager to look as much like the real Mark Schultz as possible, but after doing some research into Olympic wrestlers, Liddiard devised a more nuanced approach. “The guys that grow up in this world of wrestling have a very interesting look to them: what I found out was their faces tend to flatten out,” says Liddiard. “The cartilage breaks down, their noses spread out and become flat, their foreheads and jaws kind of start to protrude. So in talking to Bill about it, we tried to make it look like these guys grew up living in that world.” The artist added a wider bridge to Tatum’s nose and spread out his nostrils with plumpers (small prosthetic pieces worn inside the nose or mouth). Liddiard also covered Tatum’s tattoos, made his lip protrude with lower-jaw plumpers and gave him artificial cauliflower ears.
One of Tatum’s most talked-about moments in Foxcatcher was a narrowly avoided disaster for the make-up team. In one harrowing scene (seen in the trailer), an aggravated Mark Schultz rams his head into a mirror. The blood viewers see is real: Tatum actually did cut his forehead open. Fortuitously, the injury corresponded with Liddiard’s existing makeup. “What I was the most amazed by is that we had shot a lot of [later] scenes before that, which were meant to have the continuity of what he does to himself in that room,” Corso explains. “So he had [fake] bruises and cuts on him, and it was the ultimate irony that Channing actually hurt himself in pretty much the same places that Dennis had mapped out. When you think about it, it could easily have been anywhere. But Dennis had put a nice big bruise very close to where Channing cut himself. That’s a good collaboration right there!”
Mark Ruffalo as Dave Schultz
Mark Ruffalo had the most subtle make-up job of all three lead actors, yet ironically, “Mark actually wound up being one of the harder make-ups,” says Corso. Much of the make-up team’s time was spent shaving back Ruffalo’s hairline and shaping his beard to better resemble Dave Schultz through the years. But once he saw how much make-up his co-stars were getting, Ruffalo became enthusiastic about pushing his look even further. “So while we were testing Channing and testing Steve, Mark Ruffalo was like, sticking cotton up his mouth and stuffing tissues in his cheeks, and going like, ‘What about this guys? What about this?’” Corso reveals with a laugh. “So he was all excited.”
Ruffalo ended up getting plumpers behind his upper lip, which flattened and bulked out his face. Corso used shading to emphasize an existing bump on Ruffalo’s nose to make it look like a healed break. And as a final touch, the make-up team put standouts behind his ears, “so that his ears would stick out a little bit more like Channing’s, so that the brothers had a closer silhouette.”
Steve Carell as John du Pont
“Look, the nose is actually very small,” Corso says of Steve Carell’s now-famous prosthetic. “Du Pont had a very distinct profile that was very beak-like, the irony being that he called himself ‘the golden eagle.’ So although Steve has a full nose on, it’s really just the ridge of the nose that changed; I gave him more of a hook to the bridge.” Corso believes that other aspects of the makeup – a forehead prosthetic that hid Carell’s distinct eyebrows, a fake lower lip that changed the shape of his mouth – actually contributed more to the actor’s transformation.
Liddiard also points out that Corso dramatically changed Carell’s skin tone to reflect du Pont’s blue-blooded ancestry. “Steve’s very Mediterranean and olive-skinned, and that pale paint job over dark skin is incredible,” he says of his colleague’s work. Corso completed Carell’s metamorphosis with a relatively simple detail: Dark contact lenses. “Steve has got very light pretty eyes, and du Pont had these dark, almost soulless eyes,” says Corso. “And with that pale face and the light eyebrows and grey hair, it was those dark eyes that really give you the focus of his face. So that, to me, was the cap of the whole makeup.”
Image credits: AP Photo/Sony Pictures Classics and Scott Garfield; Everett/Getty Images
