What face do you want? In Hollywood, where masks truer than life are drawn
Meet Mike Marino, Hollywood's most famous make-up artist, the man who turned superstar Heidi Klum into a big worm, actress Natalie Portman into a swan and scarred the lanky Colin Farrell.
by Jill Krasny
6' min read
6' min read
Mike Marino has spent the last thirty years transforming the faces of Hollywood's most famous personalities. Under his hands all the metamorphoses a body can undergo have taken place. From those of time and grief in The Fantastic Mrs Maisel to the botched fillers in the music video of Save Your Tears by The Weeknd, to the results of gruesome violence on Matilda De Angelis in The Undoing - The Unspoken Truth. His lifelike reproduction of Natalie Portman's head made possible the actress's eerie neck elongation in The Black Swan, and he is also the hand behind the legendary Halloween costumes worn by Heidi Klum, including E.T., a Worm and Jessica Rabbit.
Last January, two Golden Globe winners publicly acknowledged the value of Marino's work in their performances: the first is Colin Farrell, best actor in the miniseries The Penguin, the other is Sebastian Stan, star of A Different Man, the thriller born from Aaron Schimberg's creativity about a shy aspiring actor whose disfigured face - marked by neurofibromatosis, a genetic disease - comes to define his own identity. In his thank-you speech, Farrell joked that it "only took him three hours" in Marino's chair to transform himself into Oz Cobb, Gotham's limp, hook-nosed gangster in The Penguin: "Mike's imagination as co-creator and his amazing genius as an artist made my character so alive that I wouldn't have been able to play him fully if I hadn't seen his model first. Oz's physicality, his limitations and handicaps, in essence his otherness, were of such realism and such precision in every detail, that I had never before been confronted with anything like it'. The actor sees their work as a collaboration. 'I started from what he made and walked - nay, limped - in that direction'.
But it was for her work in A Different Man that the make-up artist, now 48, received her third nomination for an Academy Award: "It is always an honour to receive recognition, especially when the subject I make up conveys a positive message about who we are and how we can be treated by others," she says.
"It was great working with Mike, I don't think we could have made the film without his contribution," explains director Aaron Schimberg. "The striking thing about Stan's prosthetics is that they still allow you to read all the emotions. They have a very realistic design, they look human to all intents and purposes". The challenge in the film was to evoke 'the complexity and sensitivity of the character'. So Marino wanted his prostheses to reproduce the medical condition as accurately as possible, and modelled them on the co-star, actor Adam Pearson, who actually suffers from neurofibromatosis. Facial details were replicated using photographs and 3D scans. The experience of wearing the prostheses made a deep impression on Stan: "Firstly, they were so realistic that they allowed me to walk freely around New York without anyone realising they were fake," says the actor. "Secondly, they influenced much of my performance. From the way I walk to the way I stand to the way I perform any activity - it is the prostheses that have guided my acting'. Marino sought to make work that was 'inspired by the best auteur directors such as David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Charlie Kaufman'.
He remembers the first time he saw Lynch's The Elephant Man: as a child, terrified by the film, almost rapt, he erased the title every time he saw it on the TV guide. "When, a few years later, I decided to watch it, I realised its profound value. It was truly inspirational for him. "I asked myself an endless series of questions: 'What is this? Is this a trick? How did they make it?" Some time later, watching make-up artist Rick Baker transform a young Michael Jackson into a were-cat in The Making of Thriller, Marino realised: "This is what I want to do with my life". He started going to libraries - he kept books for months - devoured Wolverine comics, studied Michelangelo's sculptures, but also everything his idols Baker, Rob Bottin and Kevin Yagher had worked on, which involved watching a lot of RoboCop and The Crypt Tales. His journey into the world of prosthetics actually began in high school, when he started experimenting, turning his friends into monsters, old people and injured teenagers. "Monstrous faces, burn effect make-up, scars and scratches, all with the sole purpose of scaring," he says. As it got better, the urge to joke was swept away by a deeper question: 'Am I able to fool you into believing that this is real? Most of the time I deceive everyone'.
