Believe the hype. “Wicker,” now in theaters, is every bit as horny, romantic and wonderful as the trailer leads you to believe.
Olivia Colman plays a spinster fisherwoman in a medieval community where marriage is what gives a woman worth. Although she is a fierce independent woman, the village mocks her as she goes about making her living. One day she goes to the local basket weaver, played by Peter Dinklage, and asks him to make her a wicker husband.
Enter Alexander Skarsgård — yes, that is him under all that makeup — wearing a practical suit and prosthetic makeup to transform him into a basket man.
It began with Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who were adapting Ursula Wills’ short story “The Wicker Husband.” Weta Workshop artists, prosthetic makeup designer Joe Dunckley and lead makeup FX artist Sarah Rubano received the script and a call from the writers and directors who told them, “We want to make this practically,” says Dunckley. “They wanted a piece of beautiful concept art that showed their vision.”
The pair spent 18 months in research and development alone. Because prosthetic makeup materials are manufactured to imitate human flesh and skin, it posed a challenge. “This guy is made of wicker, so we had to do it a different way,” Dunckley says. He continues, “We tested our theory. We thought that if we could get the strands of the weave to be individual and get them to move as if they were individual muscle fibers that drove his movement, then he could be a believable sentient wicker being.”
But they couldn’t mold it, so the pair were pushed toward modern innovation using 3D digital sculpting and 3D printing.
They began with a full-body scan of Skarsgård so they could sculpt pieces specific to him.
The intricate basket weave was created using a relatively new powder-bed laser-sintered printing process. Dunckley explains, “It’s a volume of thermoplastic elastomer; you shoot a laser into it and where that focal point of the laser is, it fuses the powder and you can build intricate weave and complex geometry. The powder in the bed holds the strands apart while they set.”
And why didn’t Colman get splinters during the film’s steamy bonking scenes?
Nearly all of Skarsgård’s costume was made up of 50 individual 3D-printed appliances that were painted to look like wicker before being stitched onto a suit made out of soft, flexible spandex — so no actual straw was involved.
Dunckley says, “It’s a semiflexible material, not too dissimilar to the feeling of touching proper wicker weave.”
As for the prosthetics, Rubano focused on the makeup, which comprised 10 individual pieces.
Rubano says, “He would get into this very fitted suit and we would bounce between the makeup chair and getting him ready in the suit, depending on the different stages.” She goes on to say, “We had ears, eye bags and lips. We had an underlip piece and a jaw piece, and the larger forehead, nose, cheekbones and there was lots of hand painting around his eyes.”
His facial hair — beard, hair and eyelashes — was constructed from muka, a silky-soft fiber extracted from the harakeke plant. This material allowed them to knot the individual strands onto the weave itself so they could cut and style it like human hair.
The key was not to lose Skarsgård under the makeup. Dunckley says the team used 3D animation software: “We could track the expressive range of the face so that we could engineer into the weave the ability to move for his expression.”
In all, it took under two hours to transform Skarsgård into the wicker husband. “90 minutes is where we were by the end of it,” Rubano says.
Dunckley adds, “The other big piece to the puzzle was Alexander himself. What a wonderful collaborator and team player! He was resilient. He was funny. He was so invested. He would sit as still as a statue in the chair.”
They encountered one small issue. Rubano reveals, “He runs hot; the suit’s kind of hot and it was a hot Hungarian spring.”
And what about the wicker penis?
“There’s been a lot of speculation about just the mechanics of how this would work and about the potential danger of a wicker penis,” Dunckley says. “I think the basket maker, he’s skilled. He’s traveled the world. He’s learned from every culture how to weave, and I think he would know exactly how to weave a wicker ween so it’s user-friendly.”
Rubano credits the film’s costume designers András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász for that detail. “They fabricated the wicker ween for the full-body river shot. They did such a great job because it was very last minute, but it’s puff spandex. The weave was 3D, so there was dimension to it. From a distance, they color-matched it so beautifully.”
