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.”
