Rufus Sewell’s butt made headlines earlier this year when it was inaccurately reported that he wore a prosthetic butt to play Prince Andrew in Netflix‘s “Scoop,” the juicy dramatization of his disastrous interview regarding a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
“There’s an account of him wearing bum prosthetics and body prosthetics, but he was literally joking to another journalist,” “Scoop” prosthetic makeup designer Kristyan Mallett told IndieWire. “That is a body double [when you see him naked from behind]. I’m sure loads of people would love to stick on Rufus bum prosthetics, but I didn’t get the luxury this time. Maybe next time.”
But despite the absence of a prosthetic posterior, Mallett and hair and makeup designer Kirstin Chalmers had their hands full. “The two faces are very, very different,” Chalmers told IndieWire. “Andrew’s is very long and Rufus is very chiseled and almost like a diamond shape. Rufus has a very amazing chin, and Andrew doesn’t.” After looking at photos morphing the two faces together to ascertain whether a transformation for “Scoop” would be possible, they moved ahead with a digital scan of Sewell’s face for Mallett to work on.
“We then had a plaster cast of Rufus in our workshop, which we could then go ahead and start modeling on,” Mallett said. “You look at images, and you sort of think, ‘He’s naturally handsome and he’s chiseled,’ so we knew it was going to be a challenge. But it is really a case of dialing Prince Andrew into Rufus and negotiating a look that isn’t all of a sudden you’ve got an actor wearing a full-on mask who can’t perform.”
Ultimately, Mallett’s work encompassed neck prosthetics, cheek prosthetics, nose, eye bags, eyelids, and forehead. But it wasn’t until those were complete that Chalmers could design the wig because the weight changed the shape of Sewell’s head. The first design was quite good, they both remembered, but not quite right for Sewell’s performance. “When Rufus was performing as Prince Andrew, he likes to tuck his shoulders up and pull his chin in quite a lot,” Mallett said. “And what happened was that when he pulled his chin in, it made it look like his mouth was being pinched because there was just too much material on the jowls. We had to negotiate that more. And we are talking like millimeters of a difference, but unfortunately, we had to resculpt that whole thing because they all overlapped.”
Mallett claimed the prosthetics process was “just very much sticking on rubber and trying to blend it in and making sure that works.” (“You make it sound so simple!” Chalmers chimed in with a laugh; watch the full process in the video below.)
Chalmers’ work was “little touches, you know, once you get the hair and the wig. Rufus’ eyebrows were quite dark and quite raised, so I had to bleach them into a more ginger shade. And because of the way that his would go up and Andrew’s go down, I had to lay in individual hairs to change the shape as well. The eyebrows took a long time. It took us some time every single day to make sure that it was as accurate as the previous day. So yeah, it was delicate work. Beautiful paintwork, beautiful, delicate work.”
Despite the extensive process (though the team got its application down to just two-and-a-half hours a day), both Mallett and Chalmers raved about Sewell’s dedication. “He was amazing. He was so good,” Mallett said. “He looked after it. He didn’t sweat. He lived to the accreditation of what Prince Andrew would do.”
“Scoop” is now streaming on Netflix.
