Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Mike Marino has spent the past three decades transforming Hollywood’s most bankable faces. His hands have conjured every metamorphosis a body could go through – from the ravages of time and loss (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel) to botched fillers (The Weeknd’s “Save Your Tears” music video) to grisly violence (Matilda De Angelis in The Undoing). His lifelike replica of Natalie Portman’s head allowed her to stretch her neck alarmingly far in Black Swan, and he is the hand behind Heidi Klum’s legendary Halloween costumes, including ET, a worm and Jessica Rabbit.Last month, two Golden Globe winners acknowledged performances defined by Marino’s handiwork. Colin Farrell took best actor in a limited anthology or series for The Penguin, while Sebastian Stan triumphed for A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg’s wildly inventive thriller about a shy would-be actor whose disfigured face – marked by neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder – has come to define his identity. In his acceptance speech, Farrell joked that “all it took was three hours” in Marino’s chair to become the limping, beak-nosed Gotham gangster Oz Cobb in The Penguin. “Mike’s imagination as a co-creator and his astonishing brilliance as an artist and sculptor really brought the character alive for me in ways I wasn’t fully able to access until I first saw his design,” says Farrell by email. “Oz’s physicality, his limitations and physical handicap, his ‘otherness’, basically, was so profound and singular… like nothing I’d ever ventured into before.” He very much sees their work as a collaboration. “I took what he did and ran with it… or limped, as the case was.”But it’s for his work on A Different Man that Marino has been nominated for a third time for an Academy Award. “It’s always an honour to be recognised by your peers,” says the 48-year-old from Nanuet, New York, who has piercing blue eyes and black guitar-god hair, “especially when the subject matter has a positive message about who we are and how we’re treated by others.” “It was amazing working with Mike, and I really don’t feel that we could have made the film without him,” says Schimberg. “The thing that is so striking about [Stan] in the prosthetics is that you can read his emotion. He feels like a fully fleshed-out human being. It’s a very humanistic design.”Marino was keen to take on the challenge of creating prosthetics that would reflect the medical condition with as much accuracy as possible. The challenge, he says, was to evoke the “complexity and sensitivity of the character”. Marino modelled his prosthetics on Stan’s co-star, the actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis. His facial details were replicated using photographs and 3D scans. The experience of wearing the prosthetics affected Stan deeply. “One, they were so real it allowed me to walk around New York freely and nobody doubted me,” says the actor. “Second, they informed a large part of my performance. From walking to standing to witnessing to being, [the prosthetics] gave me everything.”Marino strived to make an “authentic piece” that was “influenced by the best auteur filmmakers like David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Charlie Kaufman”. He particularly recalls his early experience of seeing Lynch’s The Elephant Man: as a small child terrified of the film, Marino would black out its title whenever he saw it in TV Guide. “When I watched it later in life I came to understand how beautiful it was.” The film came to be a formative inspiration. “It really got my brain churning: ‘What is this… make-up? What is this thing? How did I see that? How did they do that?’”Years later, he watched make-up artist Rick Baker turn a young Michael Jackson into a werecat in The Making of Thriller: “I was like, this is what I want to do with my life.” He hit the library, holding on to books for months while devouring Wolverine comics, Michelangelo sculptures and anything his heroes Baker, Rob Bottin and Kevin Yagher had worked on, which meant watching lots of RoboCop and Tales from the Crypt. His journey into prosthetics began when he started experimenting at high school, turning his friends into monsters, elderly men and injured teens. “There were monster faces and burn make-up and scars and scratches – just trying to scare people,” he says. But as he improved, the prankish urge was swept away by a deeper question: “‘Can I fool you to think this is real?’ And most of the time I was fooling everybody.”Eventually, he found the address of Dick Smith, often called “the godfather of make-up” for his work on The Exorcist and Amadeus. Marino wrote to him explaining that he wanted to pursue special effects as a career. “He wrote back right away.” Soon, Marino was spending hours on the phone with the Oscar winner, asking technical questions and soliciting feedback. “He would say, ‘When you do this make-up, just send me another picture, and we’ll talk about it,’” says Marino. “And then I started corresponding with him, and I got much better, quickly.” There was no training. There was no art school. Marino simply learned as he went along. A friend referred him to Saturday Night Live, where he spent two years, then he moved to LA to work on shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel. His big break came in 2007, when Jackson De Govia, the production designer on Die Hard, hired him to create a series of nude bodies for Anamorph, starring Willem Dafoe.“He was just like, ‘Oh, nice to meet you, blah, blah, blah,’” Marino recalls of meeting De Govia. “Then I took this pillowcase off this fake head, and he was like, ‘Holy shit! This is so realistic.’” De Govia later told him that he’d stuck up for him in a meeting with producers who wanted to hire someone cheaper. “He said: ‘What he brought in was not a fake head – what he brought in was a piece of art.’ He told them it would be a mistake if they didn’t hire me.” Marino wasn’t the first make-up artist in Hollywood to be undervalued. “Jack Pierce, who created Frankenstein’s monster, Wolf Man and the Mummy, was never rewarded, recognised or paid well,” he says. Neither was Lon Chaney, the actor who starred in silent film classics The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera and did his own make-up. Says Marino: “He fell into obscurity after speaking films came out.” Though Baker and Smith brought prestige to the craft, the industry still struggles for artistic recognition. “Sometimes our work gets overlooked because it blends into the project,” says Marino, “and that’s a compliment. It’s also a misconception that it should be cheap. This is handmade original art. There are dozens of people in our workshops, sometimes working for months on end with special skills.” In 2014, Marino launched Prosthetic Renaissance, his make-up studio on the East Coast, and today helms a team of five to 40 artists, only taking on jobs where, he says, he can “enhance the film and make it better. I want to create something beautiful with a statement of understanding.” On location, he’s never without his specially mixed airbrush paints; palettes of colours; special adhesives; make-up removers; sponges; brushes; various blends of hairs; and “just about anything you can imagine to help fool the audience into thinking what we do is real.” He credits Rick Baker with stressing the importance of realism, no matter how outlandish the story. “I would always try to make everything look as realistic as possible. I always thought it has to look totally real in person, and if it looks totally real in person, then it’ll look real on camera.” Of course, in the age of artificial intelligence, it’s natural to wonder whether his beloved Iwata airbrush will have a role to play in filmmaking years from now. He can’t countenance it. “AI is the pirating and stealing of all art on the planet, from writing to painting to film camera lenses, all of it,” he says. “AI is a program. It’s a thief.” When he’s not on a job, he’s studying film, writing and drawing hundreds of storyboards for the coming-of-age drama he’s written and hopes to direct, based on a true story set in New York in the late ’80s (he plans to start principal photography this year). Occasionally, he’ll draw or sculpt for fun, or even go on holiday. But it’s only a matter of days before he’s itching to go back to work. “I’m always just trying to make something and create art,” he says. “It’s such a part of me that I think it’s like breathing.”
