Right transformation
Kazu Hiro and the ‘Bombshell’ makeup team turn Charlize Theron and others into Fox News staff.
It’s hard not to be stunned by the makeup and hair work featured in “Bombshell,” director Jay Roach’s account of sexual harassment at Fox News. The uncanny prosthetic and beauty makeup created to make Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and John Lithgow resemble anchor Megyn Kelly, host Gretchen Carlson and former Fox News head Roger Ailes, respectively, plays nearly as important a role as the actors themselves.
“Our job was quite difficult because everyone knows what both the actresses and the characters they’re playing look like,” says the film’s prosthetic makeup designer, Kazu Hiro, who won an Oscar for transforming Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour.”
“To tell this story well, we had to make Charlize look like Megyn Kelly so the audience could get absorbed in the story all the way. I remember sitting next to Charlize Theron in a meeting and thinking, ‘Wow, she has such a beautiful face. I don’t want to ruin it!’ ”
Hiro, makeup department head Vivian Baker and hair department lead Anne Morgan, who have all been nominated for the makeup and hairstyling Oscar, sat down with The Envelope recently to discuss how they used prosthetics, beauty makeup and wigs to deliver that Fox look:
How did you prepare for all the transformations you had to do for this movie?
Hiro: We had about a six-week preproduction period, which was quite short, as I was tasked with doing the prosthetics for Charlize, Nicole and John Lithgow. We had to study all the photo and video references and compare the faces before starting to work on the sculpts. Then, we made a mold out of each sculpt and then formed the prosthetics based on those molds. Can you give us a brief rundown of the work you did on Charlize Theron?
Hiro: Because the facial proportions were different, I had to figure out the most