Netflix Shares a Behind-the-Scenes Look at Hair & Makeup for 'The Irishman'
Aging characters to cover a span of 50 years.
Martin Scorsese‘s Netflix production The Irishman has been soaring high with good reviews and rising stream counts — Netflix’s reported investment of $200 million USD for the film seems to be paying off. With such an ambitious production, the streaming giant has offered a glimpse (via a short clip) of the kind of work that was put in for hair and makeup.
Starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, the movie follows the story of World War II veteran Frank Sheeran, an American labor union official who was accused of being tied to several notorious criminal figures in post-war America. “The film takes place from 1949 to 2000 and it goes back and forth in time, continuously,” says Scorsese, describing the dynamic timeframe the characters in the movie are set in. The actors were both aged and made young in a wide range, covering a number of stages like “the younger old age” or “older old age.” Hair Department Head Sean Flanigan mentions, “we basically oversaw the whole entire cast: over 200 characters. With every single character, there were going to be wigs or multiple wigs.” Furthermore, there was a strong focus in the decades ’50s, ’60s and ’70s where the aging had to be done subtly — CGI was not going to be used for makeup. As a finishing note, the clip ends with the makeup artist Clara White saying “we never want what we do to be so noticeable that it’s distracting[, instead] they just accept it and believe it.”
Scroll above for a look at the clip offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of hair and makeup production for The Irishman.
Elsewhere, here’s everything coming to and leaving Netflix in January 2020.
