How ‘Fallout,’ ‘Chad Powers and ‘Stranger Things’ Makeup and VFX Artists Went all in on Prosthetics and Transformations

This season, makeup artists have transformed actors using everything from sublime touches to complete prosthetics. Underneath it all, no matter how many hours and prosthetic pieces, they have one common goal: to preserve the actor’s performance.

For Prime Video’s “Fallout,” Walton Goggins returns as the Ghoul, a character for which prosthetic department head Jake Gerber used nine silicon pieces. The very first application took five hours, but for Season 2, Gerber managed to reduce the transformation time to under two-and-a-half hours.

The missing nose and scar tissue that define the character were relatively easy to achieve. However, Johnny Pemberton’s Thaddeus proved to be more challenging because it required a subtle transformation. “It was three pieces: a forehead with a receding hairline and two sides of the face,”Gerber says.”With the Ghoul, Walton’s face is entirely covered, with the exception of his eyelids and his ears. If there is a misalignment on something, it’s not quite as noticeable with the Ghoul. With Thaddeus, if it’s off slightly, it’s bad. If you’re off by a millimeter, it can affect the whole look of everything.”

This season also features Ghoul kids, who run around doing Thaddeus’ bidding. These also proved to be a challenge for Gerber – not so much with their makeup, but with labor laws. Children are legally only allowed to work for eight hours a day. “We had to get everything on them in no more than 45 minutes – usually half an hour,” he says, noting they doubled up, using twice as many makeup artists to improve speed.”We had to engineer it, so it’d be taken off quickly.”

On the sublime side was Hulu’s “Chad Powers.”

Special makeup effects designer Vincent Van Dyke and makeup department head Alexei Dmitriew teamed up to transform Glen Powell, who leads the series as Russ Holliday, a hotshot quarterback whose college football career crumbles when he makes mistake in the national title game. Eight years later, Russ makes a last-chance gambit to resurrect his football dreams by disguising himself as Chad Powers, a talented oddball who walks on to the struggling South Georgia Catfish team.

Van Dyke created “disguise makeup,” but had to be sure that under any look he created, he couldn’t lose Powell. That gave the makeup artist a parameter with what he had to work with, at least from a design perspective.

Van Dyke, along with showrunner Michael Waldron, were determined not to depict disguise makeup as someone putting on a mask or ripping a mask off. It was an opportunity to show the process and craft, and they wanted to do it properly – especially since Chad would be applying the disguise on-screen. “Michael wanted it to be what we do. [In the show] Chad’s delivering these pieces to Fox for a Michael Mann movie, and all of a sudden, he takes them and puts them on,” Dmitriew says. “The process is very true to what we do, even when they’re applying it in the episodes.”

That process began with four to five plaster head castings of Powell, which served as an exploration process for Van Dyke.”It was a Mr. Potato Head process where you can take off the mullet from option A, and put it on option C,” he says.

Once that was decided, the next challenge was coming up with something production friendly; there wasn’t enough time during the production day for Powell to sit in the makeup chair for five hours.

The transformation took just under an hour and consisted of a full custom lace, dentures, a forehead piece, a nose and cheek piece, as well as appliances to the upper lip. There were also lace eyebrows and a mustache.

“We airbrushed and added some freckles and little things that make it come to life and create a realistic skin tone for Chad,’ says Dmitriew.

On the opposite side of transformation was Netflix’s massive overhaul for “Stranger Things.” Jamie Campbell Bower returned as Vecna. terrorizing Hawkins, Ind. The last time audiences saw him at the end of Season 4, he had been shot at numerous times and set alight.

After speaking with showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer, makeup effects department head Barrie Gower knew they could only go in one direction with the character. “Vecna 2.0” as he was nicknamed, needed to be bigger, more menacing and more of a threat.

“They described him as ‘Vecna on steroids,’and as if the essence and power of the upside down was literally pumping through him,”says Gower.

With Vecna’s overall appearance, there was more negative space from what his body had been through. He also needed the ability to extend his arms and use them as weapons. Vecna 2.0 required a crossover with the VFX team.

“We spoke with Betsy Paterson, the VFX producer, and the VFX team, about what we would bring to the table this season, what would be great for Jamie’s performance, and what wouldn’t hinder them when they then go into post-production,” Gower adds. Then, the teams created head and shoulder prosthetics. “We kept his right arm, because that was going to be very important for a lot of his performance, where he touched other characters or to give him a lot of dexterity,”he says.

In season 4, Vecna had a mechanical left hand with large aluminum finger extensions. Gower wanted to keep those extended fingers, allowing for a “sense of spatial awareness.”

In addition, a special catsuit was made from Lycra with Vecna’s pattern digitally printed over it, as a reference for color and textures.

Another big change came as Gower jumped on the 3D printing bandwagon – the technology had improved significantly since the last season.

“His head, shoulder and arm consisted of classical sculpture with plasticine and clay, but we had lots of overlapping vines,” he says. “We were able to sculpt, scan, 3D print and incorporate those into the sculpture, and you could get a much higher definition to the sculpture.”

In blending traditional and state-of-the-art techniques, Gower could print 3D spikes and horns, and glue those into his makeup. “It was less extensive, but it was almost more complicated,’ says Gower. “We ended up with about 11 or 12 overlapping pieces over his head and shoulder, and his on his arms. He had new contact lenses and dentures. We dialed everything up to 11.”