How ‘The Whale’ prosthetics blaze new trails with technology

Darren Aronofsky’s frequent collaborator Adrien Morot has earned his second Oscar nomination (shared with makeup department head Judy Chin and hair artist Annemarie Bradley) for developing and fabricating “The Whale’s” weight-gain prosthetic. The achievement goes beyond makeup: The innovative silicone suit is arguably as much a part of Charlie, the film’s central, 600-pound character, as Brendan Fraser’s raw, sympathetic performance in the role.

Morot has done makeup effects for director Aronofsky’s “Mother!,” “Noah” and “The Fountain”; he got his previous nomination for “Barney’s Version” and built the current horror hit “M3GAN’s” title animatronic. For “Whale,” he employed digital sculpting and 3-D printing to extents previously unheard of in his traditionally hand-modeled field. Now L.A.-based, Morot had been experimenting with the technologies in his hometown Montreal studio for some time before COVID hit.

Soon after, Aronofsky called.

“Nobody was working so we could isolate a little group together and film ‘The Whale,’ which happens in just one apartment and could be shot in five weeks,” Morot recalls the filmmaker enthusing. “I was like, OK, this was the time to do it. I didn’t have physical access to the actor to do a normal life casting, so let’s do that digitally. It’s a small movie; if it doesn’t go well, nobody’s going to hear about it!”

Makeup artist Adrien Morot digitally sculpts makeup over a scan of Brendan Fraser’s head.

(/Courtesy of A24)

He can make that joke now, but Morot was determined to create the best, most realistic weight-gain prosthetic ever filmed. For reference, he put together a bank of online photos of people with obesity. Then he checked other movie makeup artists’ work, and was rather appalled.

“Almost systematically, those kind of makeups were either done in comedies where the character was the butt of a joke — ‘Nutty Professor,’ ‘Shallow Hal’ — or it’s in a sci-fi/horror movie,” Morot says. “I thought it was crazy to treat those characters like that. Obviously, this movie is trying to treat the subject with empathy, care and acuity.”

Adrien Morot adds a bit of glue to the Charlie facial appliance on Brendan Fraser, while Annemarie Bradley-Sherron styles his hair.

(NIKO TAVERNISE/Courtesy of A24)

Though well aware of complaints about the film that range from how Charlie’s condition is depicted to why an actor of larger size wasn’t cast, Morot says he “can’t imagine anybody else doing a better job at conveying the range of emotions required in that script than Brendan did. My only job was to do my part as accurately and respectfully as I can.”

Instead of using the makeup artist’s usual clay, Morot sculpted the body suit on computer over a scan of Fraser that an associate had made in the actor’s New York garage. Positives of the digital body parts with and without the sculptures on them were 3-D printed in resin that was cured, layer by microscopic layer, with ultraviolet light. Then silicone was injected between negative casts of the sculptures and the positives, which yielded the very realistic-looking prosthetics that composed the suit.

The silicone also moved like human flesh. It bore the weight of water too.

“I opened up the mold and was like, ‘This looks great!’” Morot says. “‘A silicone suit! Never been done before!’ Then I took the skin off the positive, it flopped on the floor. I lifted it up and was like, ‘Jesus Christ, what was I thinking?’ It was so heavy.”

The torso section, in fact, had to be constructed out of foam latex so it wouldn’t crush Fraser.

Brendan Fraser wears an intricately crafted weight-gain suit, which was created beginning with a laser printer, in “The Whale.”

(A24)

“The full body — with the arms, the legs, the torso — was close to 200 pounds,” Morot says of the finished contraption. “In some places, the body was 2 ½ feet deep, so we needed to have a skin that was about a quarter of an inch thin and rest over a structure that needed to move like a real body.”

That understructure involved rings of gelatinous, squishy Orbeez balls in a mix of water and glycerin. The suit then was clipped to a parachute-type harness Fraser wore, under which he had a cooling outfit that pumped cold water through vinyl tubing.

It took five people to dress Fraser from his feet up to the top of the back zipper each day he wore the full suit (when feasible for the shots, he wore just the Orbeez sections under clothes with photorealistic arms and legs clipped on). After a few weeks on the film’s New York shoot, the makeup team got the whole process, including face and hair, down to about 3 ½ hours.

Brendan Fraser, without his Charlie makeup.

(Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

One arm prosthetic was detachable to permit Fraser to feed himself at lunch. And yes, the suit had a bathroom flap. But don’t think that made things easy.

“If he needed to use the toilet, poor Brendan had to tell us 45 minutes in advance,” Morot says. “We needed to wheel him to our room, remove the arms, open the clasps at the bottom, put him back in the wheelchair and take him to the bathroom. It was an operation that needed four guys.”

No one ever said that blazing new trails was easy.

“When I was doing all the tests in my Montreal shop, I thought all the real professionals out here or at Wētā were doing it too,” Morot says. “Then, as I was talking to my friends in L.A. or Richard Taylor in New Zealand about the 3-D printing prosthetics and stuff, everybody was like, ‘You’re doing what? How? Nobody does that!’ I think ‘The Whale’ is a perfect vehicle to bring it out, and hopefully people will remember [the process] in the future.”