The monster maker: Meet the prosthetics guru behind The Last of Us , Game of Thrones , and more

The origins of the Infected on HBO's The Last of Us goes back to Chernobyl. The show, not the nuclear disaster.

Craig Mazin, a showrunner on The Last of Us with Neil Druckmann who won two Emmys for his work on that limited series, needed a prosthetics expert. He wanted realistic designs for the victims of the Last of Us cordyceps fungal plague, which transforms humans into vicious, mutated creatures. So Mazin turned to a proven monster maker: BGFX, the makeup effects company of Barrie and Sarah Gower.

The company had worked with Mazin to design the various looks of the radiation victims on Chernobyl, earning Barrie Gower an Emmy nomination. Gower's successes go even further back. He has four Emmy wins under his belt from Game of Thrones and Stranger Things.

"[Mazin] said, 'I've got something in the pipeline you'd be really interested in.' And then there was a press release about six months later," Gower tells EW. "And then I sort of stalked Craig for a little period, saying, 'You know, it'd be great to work together.'"

Gower speaks with EW on some of his most notable creature creations, from the Infected of The Last of Us all the way back to the Night King of Game of Thrones.

HBO / Netflix / Everett Collection Barrie Gower, make-up artist extraordinaire, discusses his work on 'Game of Thrones,' 'Stranger Things,' 'The Last of Us,' and more.

The Infected (<em>The Last of Us</em>)

In the world of The Last of Us, all Infected are not created equal.

To use terminology straight from the games, there are Runners, the kind of freshly made Infected that are closer to your standard zombie, in that they will chase you in the hopes of turning you into another cordyceps puppet. Gower and his team discussed the idea of "raised veins" to visualize how the parasite would make its way to the victim's brain from the bite mark.

"We had to show some kind of travel in the vein network coming up through the body," he says. "We looked at lots of different organic shapes for veins. We looked at things like worm larvae burrowing under the skin. We looked at jellyfish, the scars that you get in these random organic patterns, and we also looked at leaf miners, which you can see sometimes on leaves and plants. It's a parasite, a termite, which burrows under the skin of the leaf and creates all these swirls."

Above Runners are Clickers. The more a victim is stricken with the cordyceps infection, the more the fungi mutates the body. Clickers are Infected that have become blind due to the growing fungus cracking through the person's skull, leaving these blooming mushrooms in place of eyes. The Clicker is forced to use its titular clicking sounds as a form of echolocation to find prey.

Gower's team wanted to give Clickers their own distinctions. "There was the benchmark — traditional orange and yellows and grays that we had in the game — but we were gonna be in lots of different environments during The Last of Us season 1," Gower explains. "Maybe as the franchise progressed, we might find climate changes; locations are gonna change; and heat, whether you are in dry or moist environments. It could also be a seasonal change. So we just said, 'Could all this have an impact on the color, the finish, and the texture of the Infected?'"

If a Clicker has more "vibrant, rich colors," Gower says, that means it comes from a green, lush environment. The more desaturated the Clicker looks, the more stark their home environment.

Vecna (<em>Stranger Things</em>)

Gower had been working on Stranger Things season 4 when he got the job on The Last of Us. He was in the midst of creating the look for Vecna, a human who's been trapped in the Upside Down for years and transmogrified by prolonged exposure to that harsh environment. Jamie Campbell Bower plays Vecna in season 4 and the character will likely return for season 5.

"The brief was: He's from the Upside Down, there needs to be a relationship between him and this environment where he's spent the last 10 years," Gower recalls. "But it's funny how we had the same artists working on Vecna that also worked on The Last of Us. So there's probably a lot of traits, shapes and forms that are quite similar."

The Duffer Brothers, the Stranger Things creators, had already cycled through various designs for Vecna before Gower's crew came aboard. So they had a clearer idea of what was needed. Gower looked to vines and similar shapes when thinking about how the Upside Down overtakes Vecna's form.

"It was probably a month or so later that they cast Jamie Campbell Bower. We got Jamie to our studio here in London, did a full body cast, and then looked at the design and almost superimposed it over Jamie's body," Gower says.

The Green Knight (<em>The Green Knight</em>)

Like Vecna in Stranger Things, Gower considers the titular creature of The Green Knight "a really extreme makeup process."

The 2021 film from director David Lowery starred Dev Patel as Ser Gawain, who embarks on a quest to seek out the Green Knight, a mystical emerald-skinned entity who tests men. Ralph Ineson was the man inside the prosthetics suit.

"Parts of this makeup were inches thick and there were really heavy appliances, as well," Gower notes of the design. "The majority of our makeups are made out of silicone rubber. When you start getting larger appliances, a lot like the Infected in The Last of Us, the weight gets heavier and heavier. Our appliances might have a thin silicone skin on them and the interior might have a lightweight foam core section to alleviate the weight."

But Ineson also had armor he wore on top of the prosthetics from the costume department. "It was quite a process and an ordeal for him," Gower remarks. "It'd be very interesting to get Ralph together with Jamie Campbell Bower so they could share their experiences in the prosthetics. Vecna was probably one of the most extreme makeup transformations we've done as a company, because he was in head-to-toe prosthetics."

The Night King (<em>Game of Thrones</em>)

Gower owes a lot to the Night King, the fantastical antagonist of Game of Thrones. It's a creation that's brought up often by his peers in the industry. The Duffers, for example, wanted their own version of the Night King for Stranger Things, hence why they reached out to its maker to create Vecna.

Gower's team came aboard Thrones in season 4. Working with concept artist Howard Swindell and sculptor Tristan Versluis to create the Night King's look around actor Richard Brake. Brake was later replaced by Vladimir Furdik, a primary stunt performer on the show. Gower explains the shift happened because the Night King role "was getting a lot more strenuous and there was a lot more stunt work involved."

"We worked very closely with the showrunners [David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] and we had a brief," he recalls. "We had texts from George R.R. Martin's books as a description of how the Night King should look. We worked with [Swindell] on having this regal crown of icicles growing out of his head."

Gower is still floored by the impact the Night King has had since those days on Thrones. "It's one of those things you do at the time and you never dream that things are going to be received as well as they are and become part of pop culture," he says.

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