‘The Sympathizer’ prosthetic makeup designer Vincent Van Dyke on creating 4 characters for Robert Downey Jr. [Exclusive Video Interview]
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When prosthetic makeup designer Vincent Van Dyke first met with Robert Downey Jr., the two men somewhat immediately hit it off. And good thing, too, since just a couple of days later, Van Dyke heard from the producers of the HBO limited series “The Sympathizer” with the hope of signing him onto the ambitious project.
“Luckily we had that earlier meeting because we had to hit the ground running,” Van Dyke tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “It was a quick turnaround to start creating and designing these looks, and get them in front of everyone’s eyes.”
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Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen and created for television by acclaimed filmmaker Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, “The Sympathizer” focuses on an unnamed man called the Captain (breakout star Hoa Xuande), a North Vietnamese spy who infiltrates the South Vietnam army during the Vietnam War and later lands in America as a refugee following the conflict. Downey, a freshly minted Oscar winner for “Oppenheimer,” plays four characters on the show, all examples of the white American establishment that heavily factor into the Captain’s life. There’s Claude, a CIA operative who serves as the Captain’s handler; Professor Hammer, a bald and overweight orientalist who used to teach the Captain; Ned Godwin, a soulless congressman with a square jaw; and Niko Damianos, an egotistical filmmaker hoping to make a classic film about the Vietnam War. Each character looks wildly different, even with Downey creating connections between the four men with his performances.
“We know that Robert is kind of jumping between characters on occasion. So his time is super valuable. And of course, we can’t have him in the chair for too long. So that was a bit of a leading force here to make sure that what we make isn’t going to take four hours in the chair every day,” Van Dyke says of his overall task as the prosthetic designer. “That was something that we took into consideration. And then also trying to make these characters unique so that they have individual silhouettes.”
That was especially key because, by the third episode, all four of the Downey creations share the screen at the same time. “That’s something that just adds a level of difficulty to a situation like this,” Van Dyke explains. “One character can work really well on its own, but all of a sudden, when you’re comparing a character with these others that you’ve just done, that’s where it can kind of fall apart. So that was a very challenging element of this as well. But it was a ton of fun, and I really had a blast doing it.”
Van Dyke is one of the most acclaimed and lauded prosthetic designers in the industry, an Emmy Award winner for “Star Trek: Picard” who has received 12 total nominations in his career. But working on “The Sympathizer” was especially rewarding for Van Dyke, he says, because of the collaboration between himself, Downey, and Director Park.
“We explored a lot more than what we normally might – meaning we often have a picture of something that we’re trying to hit with the work that we do, where it’s like, ‘Hey, this is the concept.’ And it’s a little bit more like a clear line in the sand of, ‘Okay, that’s where we need to be, don’t step over it,’” Van Dyke says. “But with this, there wasn’t that at all. It was a very loose conversation with me, Robert, and Director Park about what some of these concepts would be. And so it allowed for much more input both from Robert and Director Park to just throw ideas out and say, ‘Well, what if we did this?’”
Van Dyke has done prosthetic work for years, on everything from “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Fosse/Verdon” to this year’s blockbuster hit “Fallout,” where he designed Walton Goggins’s makeup to turn the actor into the Ghoul, a zombie-like survivor of a nuclear holocaust. In every job, he says, the goal is to make sure the prosthetic work doesn’t take away from the performance – something especially key for Downey.
“The idea is that it becomes a second skin that you just don’t even notice you have,” he says. “Often, an actor might be afraid of the idea of prosthetics, because they don’t want to feel like they’re in a mask, or they don’t want to feel like they’re going to kind of have their performance impaired at all. And these are valid concerns. There are so many things going on with Robert: teeth, contact lenses, makeup. He was game for all. These little nuances help not only visually bring these characters to life, but help Robert start to find the characters as well.”
While Claude, Professor Hammer, and even Ned Godwin look far different from Downey in real life, Damianos, the filmmaker, is only slightly modified – with a nose prosthetic, some jaw pieces, a mole, and a “lovely lace chest hairpiece that we got a kick out of doing and applying to him,” Van Dyke says. It’s a character producer that Susan Downey, Robert’s wife and longtime collaborator, was happy to see present in the series.
“I think one Susan’s notes for him was like, ‘Look, one of these one of these f–king characters still needs to be sexy,” Van Dyke says. “So can we just have one that’s attractive still and that means we’re going to keep Robert looking like Robert.”
“The Sympathizer” airs Sundays on HBO and streams on Max.
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