For The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie’s sports biopic about legendary MMA fighter Mark Kerr (played by Dwayne Johnson), prosthetic makeup design guru Kazu Hiro (The Darkest Hour, Maestro) was confronted with two choices: craft a close resemblance to Kerr or merely capture his essence.
“It’s always tricky when we do [someone’s] likeness because, if I have time, I could come up with more than 10 answers of which direction to go,” says Hiro. “In this case, just to show Benny, I sculpted two [makeup] versions. One as close as possible and a more subtle version.”
Subtlety proved the best choice, requiring fewer prosthetics but multiple stages of makeup to account for eye swelling, a broken nose and a lost tooth. “Of course, I could do more, but during filming, there would be a lot of scenes, so I had to consider the practicality of filming,” Hiro adds. “There are more elements on the face, so I had to do more touch-up and repair work. That would take time.”
What motivated Hiro to undertake Johnson’s transformation into Kerr was the fighter’s immense physicality and emotional complexity. To prep, the prosthetics designer studied the acclaimed 2002 HBO documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr.
“I was fascinated by the psychology of people who do Ultimate Fighting and who Mark Kerr was,” Hiro says. “He was such an aggressive fighter but so soft-spoken. He spoke almost like a baby. And Dwayne worked really hard to make his body look like Kerr’s.”
Unlike Hiro’s transformation of Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for The Darkest Hour and Charlize Theron into Megyn Kelly for Bombshell, the two-time Oscar winner had to deal with a new X factor: lots of sweat during the fighting scenes, which required extra touch-up and repair work. Each fight also had its own physical characteristics.
Kazu Hiro decided that Dwayne Johnson didn’t need to look exactly like MMA fighter Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine, for the “practicality of filming.” Johnson wore 22 prosthetics and a wig.
“After a few days, we started to know the chemistry of the sweat and where they to tend to sweat more,” Hiro explains. “Based on that, we learned which area comes off first — where it starts to detach from your face. So one thing to understand is what kind of sweat they have and how it comes through the skin. That weakens the adhesive. So we probably have six or seven different kinds of adhesive.
“Dwayne sweats a lot on his head but his face is quite normal,” Hiro continues. “I worked with [special effects] makeup artist Glen Griffin to figure out the best combination of adhesives to withstand the sweating. Also, Dwayne has a lot of body tattoos that had to be covered up, and then we added Mark’s tattoos on top.”
In total, there were 22 prosthetic pieces and a wig applied to Johnson via a team of nearly 20 makeup artists working four hours each day (including Johnson’s personal makeup artist, Björn Rehbein). These included a new brow bone, scars and a cauliflower ear.
Writer and producer Benny Safdie (left) with Hiro.
Hiro had to bring Johnson’s brow bone down and add a fake eyebrow to make it closer to Kerr’s heavier eyelids and bone structure. The prosthetic eyelid required extra tweaking. “The thickness was almost half an inch,” Hiro notes. “So if we glued that piece down right on his eyelid, when he blinks, he cannot blink naturally. So I made a core piece that attached to the positive mold.”
Individual fight scenes garnered unique challenges, as sweat made the adhesives of the prosthetics come off.
A separate prosthetic to represent eye swelling during fights had to be applied in real time. “As we progressed the scene, we added more pieces on top of the likeness makeup,” Hiro explains. “We added color and showed the progression during the filming. Also, we had the scene where he shaved his hair in the middle of the film. For that, I made a silicone bald cap on top of his bald head. I punched the individual hair [inserting single hair strands into a silicone or foam latex appliance] so it can be [treated like real hair] and shaved by a real barber.”
The makeup team’s careful work on set was not without incident. “One time, the tip of [Dwayne’s] nose came off,” says Hiro. “It had to be repaired, but it would keep happening.”
Johnson (left) as Kerr and Oleksandr Usyk as Igor Vovchanchyn in the film.
See more on the making of The Smashing Machine and other awards contenders at THR‘s dedicated site for behind-the-scenes stories at THR.com/behindthescreen.
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