You think celebrities, you think nose jobs. However, actors and actresses face (no pun intended) a dilemma of having to play roles that demand something extra … or maybe they just like playing dress-up. You probably don’t dwell on Boris Karloff’s Neanderthal-like brow in original 1931Frankenstein, but the film doesn’t work without it. Unfortunately, there’s no viable way to turn your face into the spitting image of Julius Caesar outside a hunk of putty on your nose if you don’t have similar genes.
The array of appliances can vary wildly from ears (Mr. Spock) to full bodysuits (Mike Myers in the Austin Powers sequel), with the most common facial enhancement typically being the nose. Your nose is like a rug, it ties the whole face together. If you’ve never thought about it, chat up a plastic surgeon, and they’ll talk your head off detailing the nuances of a Grecian, Nubian, Snub, and Hawk profile.
If not for the effects-guru Kazuhiro Tsuji, Bradley Cooper’Maestrowould never have garnered as much press. Too bad it’s for all the wrong reasons. Cooper’s fake schnoz–shapedto mimic that of conductor Leonard Bernstein–quickly gathered controversy for playing up a Jewish stereotype, or at least that seems to be why people are angry. Trying to untangle the knotted mess that is race and acting is way harder than it looks.
How did we get from Vaudevillians taping their face to spook kids to accusations of racist fake noses? It’s a weird, winding road, and race-swapping is as old as the medium itself.
F for Fake
With advances in plastic and latex, the days ofduct-taping your nostrils to the bridge of your nosefor fifteen-hour shooting schedules came to an end, allowing Lon Chaney to portray a number of characters and races with more ease. Originally intended for wires and hoses by Du Pont, actor and prop manLucien Littlefield advancedthe biggest step in acting since cue cards when he discovered a new use for the industrial plastic.
Though regal, urbane, and always well-dressed, Orson Welles only appeared as he was born in documentaries and the occasional booze advert. He compensated for his meager, upturned nose with amore aquiline apparatus to be taken seriously. “In most of the films that I appear in, I put on a false nose.” The bigger, the better. A lifetime of fake noses was purely about insecurity, not getting lost in his characters.
When it came to transforming the slight Gary Oldman into the rotund Winston Churchill forDarkest Hour, a simple nose wouldn’t do. Enter Kazuhiro Tsuji. The real challenge wasn’t the weight difference, but trying tocompensate for disparities in facial differences(bone structure, facial length, eye width, etc.), while trying not to overdo it with make-up. “I have to understand what makes Winston Churchill look like Winston Churchill,” he said of his effects process. “The hardest part was Gary doesn’t look like Winston Churchill at all!” Effects artists usually don’t end up with something that wholly resembles the character or the actor, but a combination somewhere in between.
Normally, it’s not that obvious. Make-up and special-effects master Matthew Mungle once toldCBS Sunday Morning, that the art of special effects is in havingno one notice it is artificialor notice it at all. “We’ll spend a week on an effect, and on camera it’s a split second.”
Related:Hayden Christensen Says Obi-Wan Kenobi Make-Up Process Helped His Darth Vader Performance
Acting Aides
These appliances took much longer to catch on for actresses, but the new millennium has been a golden era for special effects. Nicole Kidman donned a suspiciously large nose for her turn as novelist Virginia Wolff inThe Hours. Glenn Close saw her performance and raised the ante with some impressive facial appliances that rendered her nearly unrecognizable as the titular role inThe Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, phony face courtesy of Mungle. Whereas Kidman looks like she’s cosplaying, Close becomes a whole different person. Sometimes more is more.
Steve Carell’s imposing beak inFoxcatcheris so distracting that in profile you can genuinely forget that it’s the goofy weather guy fromAnchorman, and perhaps that was the whole point. Alienating as it was, Carellliked the effect it had on the crew. “Once all of that make-up was on, people reacted and responded to me differently on set,” he told the BBC in 2014. At least he wasn’t sending cast mates dead rats like Jared Leto to get into character. Speaking of method acting …
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A Bridge Too Far?
Naturally, there is a minefield in the make-up/effects world, as Bradley Cooper discovered when he was accused of anti-Semitism. Determining when you’ve gone too far is hard to tell until it’s already too late. Robert Downey Jr. committed to his black face and prosthetic nose, knowing there was no other way of portraying the role of a self-obsessed method actor on his quest to prove himself the world’s greatest thespian, Kirk Lazarus' ego to be fulfilled at any cost. You subtract Downey’s role fromTropic Thunder, or Downey himself (essentially parodying himself and his ilk), and it’s not the same movie.
Downey largely evaded backlash for his turn as Kirk Lazarus, but others were not so lucky. Some Jews were enraged when Cillian Murphy,an Irish guy, played the Jewish J. Robert Oppenheimer, despite the two men being so similar-looking (down to their piercing blue eyes and gaunt face) Murphy didn’t need to alter his appearance whatsoever. With or without a fake nose, the issue suddenly became one of representation, not insulting prosthetics, shifting the conversation yet again. However, that argument springs a Titanic-sized leak when you factor in the number of Italian hood roles that Edward G. Robinson and Yiddish-theater legend Paul Muni played in the thirties to widespread acclaim. Who can keep the outrage flow charts straight anymore?
We’re a long way from the days of Myrna Loy and Marlon Brando wearing fauxepicanthal foldsto play Asians, but are we to the point where mobs won’t be happy unless every actor is required to staple an authenticated copy of their family tree to their resume & headshot when they show up to a casting call?
