To become ‘Gollum,’ Moore endured up to 7 hours of makeup, during which the upper half of her body was smothered in prosthetics, from a hunchback to long fingers and sunken-in facial makeup. On screen, it’s a truly grotesque look: veins snake across her skin as if there’s poison coursing through them, and as the film progresses, she practically decomposes in front of the audience’s eyes. “Demi was a real trooper, never complaining or even looking bored and getting distracted during the process,” says Persin.
The design of Monstro, played by Qualley, was more complicated. It saw the actor decked in a full-body suit with a random assortment of appendages, adding extra limbs and breasts where Sparkle’s face should be—which is, instead, embedded into Monstro’s back, locked in a perpetual scream (yes it’s as weird as it sounds). “The original designs were very masculine, and Coralie wanted something more feminine than just a rubber monster,” Persin says. “She wanted to have an Elephant Man sensibility, a tragic quality.” Even so, Fargeat was keen to keep it nasty. “She asked us to put some teeth biting one of the boobs, so we did,” Persin adds. The suit is all practical—except for Moore’s screaming face, which was achieved with digital effects.
We get a full view of Monstro in the film’s especially insane closing ten minutes, in which the creature appears on stage at a televised New Year’s Eve show to the horror of its well-to-do audience. The evening soon turns into a nightmare, as blood shoots from Monstro’s every orifice. This effect was achieved with the help of an actual fire hose, rigged with about 30,000 gallons of fake blood. “Because it was hard to move with the suit, the stunt performer was on a little trolley. As soon as they switched the blood rig on for the first time, she went rolling backward down that long Shining-like hallway,” Persin explains.
The heavy suit proved, unsurprisingly, a challenge on set. The production only had one suit for Qualley’s stunt performer, which was made out of foam latex, and so was essentially a giant sponge. It was resultantly drenched and turned a bloody pink. “We quickly had to dry it, clean it, sew it, and glue it back” for the next day’s shoot, Persin says.
And then, of course, there was the final shot of the movie, in which Sparkle’s face literally crawls back to her star on the Walk of Fame. For that particular scene, the team took a page out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and disintegrated an actual SFX head on set. “We used gelatine skin,” Persin says, “filled with tons of blood bags, and disgusting stuff inside, that we could blow up.” Want to feel really sick to your stomach? Just imagine the cleaning bill.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
