‘The Sympathizer’ Puts Robert Downey Jr. in Prosthetics One Last Time for Finale

Bill Desowitz
·4 min read
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[Editor’s note: Spoilers for “The Sympathizer” below.]

Turns out there was a very good reason for Robert Downey Jr. playing multiple roles in A24/HBO’s “The Sympathizer,” which is revealed in the Episode 7 finale (“Endings Are Hard, Aren’t They?). That’s when the versatile actor turns up in a surprising cameo as the Captain’s (Hoa Xuan Nguyen) father — a French Catholic priest, donning a long dark beard — and we learn that his other four character turns are toxic manifestations of the patriarch who disavowed him.

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In fact, it’s a revelation to the Captain as well when all of them blend together in his mind as troubling paternal figures during a traumatic flashback. There’s Claude, the pop music-loving CIA operative; Hammer, the gay East Asian studies professor; Ned Godwin, the military vet-turned-congressman; and Niko, the counter-culture film director. They all contribute in a surreal way to the Captain’s identity crisis as a North Vietnamese communist spy and South Vietnamese sympathizer.

It was revelatory as well for prosthetics designer Vincent Van Dyke (owner of VVDFX and an Emmy winner for “Star Trek: Picard”) when he lined up all five sculptures with hair and the beard on a table in the front of his studio during a meeting with Park Chan-wook, Downey, and executive producers Susan Downey and Amanda Burrell. “From day one, all of these heads are being done at the same time, including the father, so I had a very clear kind of relationship between them,” Van Dyke told IndieWire. “Subconsciously, for me, as I’m sculpting these looks or thinking about them, they have a different emotion behind them.”

When it came to the father, Downey was inspired by the portrait of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (“Crime and Punishment”) painted by Vasily Perov in 1872. He particularly liked the beard. The oil painting became one of the primary references, along with two other Renaissance-era paintings that Van Dyke liked (“Portrait of a Bearded Man” and “Head Study of a Bearded Man”), though they made the hair much darker.

In subsequent meetings with the makeup/hair team, they decided that Downey should wear green contact lenses to match Nguyen as the Captain, have pale skin, a large nose, and a receding hairline different from Claude’s.

“It gave us a clear, defined image [in clay], and then obviously he evolves as you go through makeup tests and the iterations of coloring and his contact lenses being a bit of a nod to the Captain,” Van Dyke added. “Now we can see why there’s a tie in there. There are all these little subtle hints that I think are really lovely.”

“We were trying to create somebody of French descent with a prominent nose with broken capillaries to express a drinking problem, and the thinning top and receding temples brought that whole character together nicely,” prosthetics makeup artist Michael Mekash (“Stranger Things”) told IndieWire.

“It was another 60 minutes to do that one between the nose, the sort of failing of his skin. And then also the application of that beard [which was a makeup piece],” makeup FX artist Chris Burgoyne (“John Adams”) told IndieWire. “Of all the looks, I think that was the one that [Downey] anticipated with the most amount of dread because of the beard.”

Indeed, for hair department head Katherine Kousakis (“Barry”), the application of the beard was a source of concern throughout the entire production. “It was such a big deal, Robert hated that beard,” she told IndieWire. “He kept telling us, ‘Wait till that day, I’m going to be so miserable, so angry.'”

Then, as the day of the shoot drew near, Van Dyke said to Kousakis that they should lighten the mood by dressing up as monks as the four of them entered the trailer to greet Downey. “So Vincent sparked an idea, and I told him we were going to do it,” she said. “We’re going to mess with Robert. That would give him the best start to his day.”

So they entered the trailer wearing hooded robes, carrying lit candles, and chanting, and Downey burst out laughing. “And then he recorded it, and I think it was a good tension breaker,” added Burgoyne. “He probably forgot about the beard completely after that.”

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