Mike Marino has spent the last three decades transforming Hollywood’s most profitable faces. His hands have conjured every metamorphosis that a body could pass, through the ravages of time and loss (The wonderful Mrs. Maisel) Failed fillings (the music video “Save Your Tears” by The Weeknd) to spooky violence (Matilda de Angelis in The ruin). His realistic replica of Natalie Portman’s head allowed her to stretch her neck alarmingly in Black SwanAnd he is the hand behind the legendary Halloween costumes of Heidi Klum, including ET, a worm and Jessica Rabbit.
Last month, two Golden Globe winners recognized performances defined by Marino’s Handiwork. Colin Farrell took the best actor in an anthology or limited series for The penguinwhile Sebastian Stan triumphed to A different man, The tremendously inventive thriller of Aaron Schimberg on an aspiring shy actor whose disfigured face, marked by neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder, has come to define his identity. In his acceptance speech, Farrell joked saying that “everything he took was three hours” in the sailor to become The penguin.
“Mike’s imagination as a cooker and his surprising brilliance as an artist and sculptor really gave my character life so I could not access for the first time until I first saw its design,” says Farrell by email. “The physicality of Oz, its limitations and physical disability, its ‘alterity’, basically, was so deep and unique … as nothing in which I had ventured before.” He sees his work a lot as a collaboration. “I took what he did and ran with him … or limited, as was the case.”
But it is for his work in A different man that Marino has been nominated for the third time for an academy prize. “It is always an honor to be recognized by his teammates,” says the 48 -year -old player from Nanuet, New York, who has perforating blue eyes and black hair of the guitar, “especially when the subject has a positive message about who we are and How others treat us. ” “It was incredible to work with Mike, and I really don’t think we could have made the movie without him,” says Schimberg. “What is so surprising [Stan] In the prostheses is that you can read your emotion. It feels like a fully developed human being. It is a very humanistic design. “
Marino was anxious to assume the challenge of creating prostheses that reflected the medical condition with the greatest possible precision. The challenge, he says, was to evoke the “complexity and sensitivity of the character.” Marino modeled his prostheses in Stan’s co -star, actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis. Its facial details were replicated using 3D photographs and scanners.
The experience of using prostheses deeply affected Stan. “One, they were so real that it allowed me to walk through New York freely and nobody doubted me,” says the actor. “Secondly, a large part of my performance reported. From walking to standing to witnessing being, [the prosthetics] He gave me everything. “
Marino struggled to make an “authentic piece” that was “influenced by the best author filmmakers as David LynchDavid Cronenberg, Charlie Kaufman. ” Particularly remember your early experience of seeing Lynch’s The elephant man: As a small child terrified of the film, Marino turned off his title every time he watched him in the television guide. “When I saw him later in life, I came to understand how beautiful it was.” The film became a formative inspiration. “I really put on my brain: ‘What is this … makeup? What is this? How did I see that? How did they do that? ‘
Years later, he saw the makeup artist Rick Baker convert a young Michael Jackson into a werecat in Thriller creation: “I thought, this is what I want to do with my life.” He arrived at the library, clinging to the books for months while devouring Wolverine’s comics, Michelangelo’s sculptures and anything his Baker, Rob Bottin and Kevin Yagher heroes had worked, which meant seeing many of Robocop and Crypt stories. His trip to the prostheses began when he began experimenting at high school, turning his friends into monsters, older men and injured adolescents. “There were monstrous faces and makeup burns and scars and scratches, just trying to scare people,” he says. But as it improved, the joke impulse was dragged by a deeper question: “‘Can I fool you to think that this is real?’ And most of the time I was cheating everyone. “
Finally, he found the direction of Dick Smith, often called “The sponsor of makeup” for his work in The exorcist and Amadeo. Marino wrote to him explaining that he wanted to look for special effects as a career. “He responded immediately.” Soon, Marino was spending hours by phone with the Oscar winner, asking technical questions and requesting comments. “He said: ‘When you do this makeup, just send me another photo and we’ll talk about her,'” says Marino. “And then I began to correspond to him, and I improved a lot, quickly.”
There was no training. There was no art school. Marino simply learned as he advanced. A friend referred to Saturday Night Livewhere he spent two years, then moved to Los Angeles to work on shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and your spin-off, Angel. His great rest came in 2007, when Jackson from Govia, the production designer in DieHe was hired to create a series of bare bodies for AnamorfoStarring Willem Dafoe.
“He was like, ‘oh, pleasure in meeting you, blah, blah, blah’,” Marino recalls to meet De Govia. “Then I removed this pillow cover of this false head, and he said: ‘Shit! This is very realistic. “” He said: ‘What he brought was not a false head: what he brought was a work of art.’ He told them that it would be a mistake if they didn’t hire me. ”
Marino was not the first makeup artist in Hollywood to be undervalued. “Jack Pierce, who created Frankenstein’s monster, Wolf Man and The Mummy, was never rewarded, recognized or paid well,” he says. Nor Lon Chaney, the actor who starred in silent film classics Notre Dame’s hunchback and The opera ghost And he made his own makeup. Marino says: “He fell into the dark after the speaking films came out.” Although Baker and Smith brought prestige to the trade, the industry still fights for artistic recognition. “Sometimes our work is overlooked because it is combined with the project,” says Marino, “and that is a compliment. It is also a wrong idea that it should be cheap. This is the original art made by hand. There are dozens of People in our workshops, sometimes working for months with special skills. ”
In 2014, Marino launched Renaissance Protthetic, its makeup study on the east coast, and today directs a team of five to 40 artists, just assuming jobs where, he says, he can “improve the film and improve it. I want to create something beautiful with a statement of understanding “. In the place, he is never without his especially mixed airbrush paintings; colored palettes; special adhesives; makeup decoupines; sponges; brushes; Several mixtures of hairs; And “almost anything you can imagine to help deceive the audience to think that what we do is real.” He gives Credit to Rick Baker for stressing the importance of realism, regardless of how extravagant the story is. “I would always try to make everything look as realistic as possible. I always thought I had to seem totally real in person, and if it looks totally real in person, then it will look real in the camera. ”
Of course, in the era of artificial intelligence, it is natural to ask if his beloved airbrush Iwata will play in the cinematographic years from now on. It cannot tolerate it. “The AI is the piracy and the theft of all the art on the planet, from writing to painting to film camera lenses, everything,” he says. “AI is a program. He is a thief. ”
When he is not in a job, he is studying cinema, writing and drawing hundreds of graphic scripts for the drama of the age of major Plan to start main photography this year). Occasionally, you will draw or sculpt for fun, or even go on vacation. But it’s just a matter of days before I am anxious to return to work. “I’m always trying to do something and create art,” he says. “It’s a part of me that I think it’s like breathing.”