Montreal makeup artist Adrien Morot won an Oscar on Sunday for his transformation of actor Brendan Fraser in the feature film The Whale.
Morot won the Oscar for Best Makeup and Best Hairstyle alongside Judy Chin and Annemarie Bradley.
The Montreal-born creator helped turn Fraser into an obese man for Darren Aronofsky’s film, which tells the story of a reclusive professor trying to reconnect with his daughter.
The team glued several pieces of thick silicone to Fraser’s face and body, before applying makeup.
The Whale has been criticized for its portrayal of the character’s weight. Although Morot acknowledged the complaints in a recent interview with La Presse Canadienne, he said his job was to make the prosthetic costume as authentic as possible.
In an interview he had given to the daily Le Devoir at the time of his selection, Adrien Morot had confided that one of the main challenges associated with this mandate was the short deadline initially imposed by the director for the start of filming.
“I begged Darren to break his five-week deadline and take the time needed. Because the film is based on Charlie, and if Charlie’s appearance does not convince, the film will not work, “he told Le Devoir.
Indeed, another challenge of this task was to make everything as real as possible, since if overweight make-up is typical of comedies or science fiction, where realism is immediately put aside by the cinephile, this was not the case with The Whale.
“This is a closed [chamber piece] with a reduced cast. Nobody wears prosthetics except the main character and he’s present in almost every scene,” Morot told online magazine The Credits in early March. “It will fill the screen. The slightest defect will be immediately noticeable. It’s a prosthetist’s nightmare. »
Other spectacular prosthetics made by Adrien Morot include those of ferocious alligators in the film Crawl and mutant superheroes in the three films X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse and X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
The Whale is Morot’s fifth collaboration with Aronofsky, following Mother!, Noah, The Fountain and White Boy Rick.
“Our director Darren Aronofsky pushed us to new heights. Thank you,” said Adrien Morot after taking the stage to receive his award.
