As the first images from Bradley Cooper’s new film Maestro trickled in earlier this year, one thing stuck out above all else: his nose. The fake nose that Bradley Cooper wore to portray Leonard Bernstein seemed to stretch beyond the boundaries of acceptable movie prosthetics. It was a gargantuan thing that – despite the assurances of Bernstein’s family – was immediately labelled as anti-semitic by the internet. At the very least, the nose deserved a best supporting actor nomination.
The furore grew so loud that even Bradley Cooper himself has had to weigh in on the matter, claiming that his conk was essential for balancing out the rest of his facial prosthetics. “I thought, ‘Maybe we don’t need to do it,’ but it’s all about balance, and, you know, my lips are nothing like Lenny’s, and my chin. And so we had that, and it just didn’t look right [without the nose]”.
But with Maestro’s release fast approaching, it seems like the nose might have been a red herring. Because in the later stages of the film, where Cooper has to play Bernstein in the winter of his years, the transformation is astounding. It might just be the best old age makeup ever seen in film.
Because of this – and, let’s not kid ourselves, to claw back some Oscar buzz after Nosegate – Variety recently published an article entitled ‘How Maestro Prosthetics Artist Kazu Hiro Transformed Bradley Cooper’s Nose, Neck and Chin to Play Leonard Bernstein’. The article is a long and detailed explanation of, yes, how prosthetics artist Kazu Hiro came to transform Bradley Cooper’s nose, neck and chin for his role in Maestro. It is also extremely fascinating.
Foremost, it’s a celebration of the work of Hiro, an artist who retired from the film business in 2012, only to be lured back by Gary Oldman, who claimed that he was the only man on Earth who could suitably transform him into Winston Churchill for The Darkest Hour. Hiro won an Oscar for that job; a feat he repeated two years later by transforming John Lithgow into Roger Ailes. The Variety article explains why he is so successful, digging down into the specific ways in which he carefully designed and constructed lip and chin pieces, and pushed out Cooper’s nose wings in a manner that would alter his voice just enough to match that of Leonard Bernstein. By the time it came to film the final scenes, Hiro spent five hours every day putting Cooper into an elaborate get-up that included a full-body suit and prosthetics for the eyes, forehead, lips, neck and hands.
If Maestro comes up short at the Oscars this year, then it’s a near certainty that Hiro will win something for his incredible makeup work. This is largely because he seems to have single-handedly pushed the famously tricky art of old-age make-up into a new era.
Lord knows it needed it. Ambitious storytelling will often follow a single character over several decades, but for most of Hollywood’s history, achieving this effect practically has been especially hard. As renowned as Citizen Kane is, for instance, it’s extremely difficult to buy the latter stages of the film, where Charles Foster Kane is presented as an elderly man. For the time, the ageing effects were cutting edge. Viewed today, though, it is extremely clear that you are just watching a 25-year-old man wearing the equivalent of a Halloween mask.
One favourite example of bad old-age makeup online belongs to Bette Midler in 1991’s For the Boys, where her character reaches an age that is supposed to represent all sorts of battle-earned dignity. Which isn’t what she looks like, of course. She looks like Mrs Doubtfire. Exactly like Mrs Doubtfire. So much like Mrs Doubtfire that you instantly stop paying attention to the film and wonder why Mrs Doubtfire is onscreen. There are other egregious examples. Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. Just about everyone asked to age up in Back to the Future 2. That terrible final scene in the last Harry Potter film.
To be clear, it has been done well in the past, but the truly excellent jobs – the ones where an actor vanishes completely into the role – are few and far between. Think of Max von Sydow, who was barely in his 40s when he played the elderly Lankester Merrin in The Exorcist, or David Bowie, who became completely unrecognisable in The Hunger. They’re so easily undone, though. If the makeup is too heavy, or if the character retains a glimmer of youthful sparkle, the illusion is undone immediately.
Although the current fad is for digital de-ageing – allowing the likes of Robert De Niro and Harrison Ford to spend great chunks of time looking like they did in their heyday – the reverse isn’t seen particularly often. Perhaps the most high-profile example comes at the end of Avengers: Endgame, where Chris Evans briefly returns as a very old Captain America. Although the look was achieved with prosthetics, a VFX team was at hand to do what makeup couldn’t, by shaving down his shoulders and thinning out his neck, and by straight-up digitally transplanting an elderly man’s skin tone on to Evans in post-production.
This helps, but there’s still an element of the uncanny to it. Whereas what is achieved in Maestro, with simple human artistry and attention to detail, is uncanny. It is a total transformation, and it’s all down to fussing over things such as hand prosthetics and nose-wing inserts. Despite decades of historical evidence, there is still a way to make old-age makeup look convincing. The bad news for Hollywood is that Kazu Hiro only has one pair of hands.
