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Meet the makeup pro behind ''Grinch'' and ''Planet of the Apes'' | jim_l
MEAN GREEN Carrey listened to the Bee Gees during his two hour makeup sessions
By Josh Wolk
Josh Wolk
Josh Wolk
Josh Wolk is a senior writer at EW and the author of ''Cabin Pressure: One Man's Desparate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor''
From underneath a mask of green makeup, Jim Carrey helped make ''Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas'' a $200 million plus grossing holiday hit. But it's special effects guru Rick Baker who transformed the star's features, and supervised the Who-ing of more than 100 actors. A five time Oscar winner, Baker, 50, has been the go to man for slathering stars since the 1970s, having mastered werewolves (''An American Werewolf in London,'' ''Wolf''), apes (''Gorillas in the Mist,'' ''Greystoke,'' ''Mighty Joe Young''), obese people (both ''Nutty Professors''), and others (''Men in Black,'' Michael Jackson's ''Thriller'' video).

EW.com talked to the prosthesis pro about working with Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy, why the Grinch doesn't wear pants, and why he decided to go back to monkeying around for Tim Burton's remake of ''Planet of the Apes.''

Jim Carrey has complained about how tough it was on him to get all Grinched up. Fair or unfair?
It was two and a half hours of makeup time, which is actually pretty short for an elaborate look like that. The Klumps were more like a three and a half hour makeup. The human stuff is harder, because on a fantasy character, if there's some slight defect, you can probably get away with it -- even though we didn't allow that to happen.

Did the Grinch's look go through many different permutations?
Yeah. The funny thing is, we ended up with what I started with. I did some initial design stuff and a test makeup on myself, which I normally do just to see what I'm putting somebody through and what it's like on the inside. I showed it to [director] Ron Howard and [producer] Brian Grazer, and they thought it was too much. Basically, it was ''We're paying Jim too much money; he's too covered up.'' So we went through six more tests, all the way down to pretty much just painting Jim green. At the last minute, they decided the first thing I did was really the best. I was thankful, because I would have been very disappointed to just see Jim painted green.

Were there discussions about whether or not the Grinch should be running around bare- assed?
I questioned that right away. I personally liked him when he was without a Santa suit. Being completely naked, he looked more like the Grinch. But he does have a big ass with a big crack in it, so it's a ''What's under all that hair?'' kind of thing. There were a lot of discussions about that. We started out with a more obvious -- for lack of a better term -- butt crack on him, that we toned down somewhat. Boy, I have weird conversations in my business. Eddie Murphy always says, ''You talk about things that nobody else in the world talks about.''

How did you come up with the new, long nosed look for the Whos?
That was the biggest challenge. At first, we tried doing as literal a translation of the Seuss drawings as we could do on a human face, and it turned out to be hideously grotesque. A distorted human face is always kind of tricky. It's a very fine line between grotesque and cute. We started with something we decided was wrong, and switched very last minute. And since we need new rubber face pieces for each day an actor works, we need some lead time to prepare the pieces. We were just about pulling stuff out of the oven and sticking it on their faces.

How do you keep the stars happy and quiet when they're sitting in the makeup chair for hours?
I have this big mallet. I just hit them in the head with it. No, it's hard because you're so focused that you're not being very entertaining. And you don't want to encourage them to talk, because it takes longer when they're moving their mouth, because you can't glue the stuff down. Eddie Murphy likes to watch TV and channel surf, so we have one in the makeup trailer with a satellite dish that we put directly behind him and he watches in the mirror. Kazuhiro Tsuji [who applied Carrey's makeup] told me Jim would listen to the Bee Gees every day. When I did Vincent D'Onofrio [as the buglike farmer] in ''Men in Black,'' his makeup took closer to six hours, which is horrible to put somebody through. I was saying, ''This is ridiculous to put him through this. We HAVE to be able to cut some time out,'' but we just couldn't.

What are we going to see in the new ''Planet of the Apes''?
Oh, boy, there's hundreds of apes to do. It's another enormous job with very little preproduction time. I really can't talk about it too much, but it's a more realistic approach [to the apes] than in the original movie. But they are still humanized in that they are biped, and they can talk.

Are monkey suits second nature for you now?
I thought I was done making apes after 1988's ''Gorillas in the Mist.'' It was always my goal to do a gorilla that people wouldn't know from the real thing, so after that I said, ''Okay, I've accomplished that; it's time to move on.'' But it's kind of like Christopher Lee saying he'll never play Dracula again. When I was approached about ''Mighty Joe Young,'' I had a real hard time turning that down. [The 1949 original] was always one of my favorite films. I did the Dino De Laurentiis version of ''King Kong'' in 1976 and was always disappointed because I wasn't able to do it as realistically as I wanted, and I thought this would be a good way to make up for that. And after that I thought, ''Okay, I'm DEFINITELY not gonna do any more.'' And then Tim Burton called me. It was such a landmark makeup picture, and I just had the hardest time turning it down. I'm a big makeup geek and a big ape geek, and I just thought, I really have to do this.


Posted Dec 18, 2000 | Order Article Reprints