Of the many twists and surprises in Jacques Audiard’s audacious musical “Emilia Pérez,” the most startling comes during the film‘s end credits, when one realizes that breakout performer Karla Sofía Gascón stars as the eponymous Emilia both pre- and post-gender-affirming surgery. Of course she’s the stunning Emilia, but she also plays evil cartel leader Manitas.
That’s a bold move, and no one involved in the transformation of Gascón into a male character took it lightly.
“I was scared for Karla when we had to talk about this part of the film,” co-head of makeup Julia Floch Carbonel told IndieWire. “I was scared to put her back somewhere that she, of course, had been really unhappy. But what we created, she was really joyful about it. Very enthusiastic all the time.”
For Manitas, the terrifying cartel leader who hires a young lawyer named Rita (Zoe Saldana) to act as a go-between to schedule gender-affirming surgery, Audiard wanted a “chimera,” Floch Carbonel said, “a really scary presence to contrast with Emilia after. Also because it’s not only about transition, it’s about the way that finally Emilia can express the love that she has. [As Manitas,] she’s stuck in the representation of male violence, so we wanted a big contrast because between scary and a really soft, modern after.”
“With Manitas, I did not care how horrible she looked, but with Emilia, I wanted her to be so perfect,” Gascón told IndieWire. “I wanted her to be on screen exactly the way I wanted to see her. So I drove them nuts with everything, with hair and makeup. But I think we did a great job.”
Aiding in Gascón’s transformation were select prosthetics from the head of make-up SFX Jean-Christophe Spadaccini, who began working with Audiard and Gascón a year before production began.
“We did very early tests,” Spadaccini said. “And the first test, she looked like [co-star] Edgar Ramirez. But it really was a luxury to have so much time, doing a test a year before [then] doing more tests maybe six months later, and then finding this character, touch by touch.”
Ultimately, what they landed on was simple: three prosthetic pieces (nose and cheeks) that took an hour each day to apply. “Jean-Christophe’s team is incredible,” Gascón said. “I really found that all the techniques they used were very impressive. For example, the first layer of makeup, after the silicone, he was using a toothbrush and kind of mixing the paint with alcohol and then splashing it on the skin and then very carefully applying it to get the perfect skin where you would even see flaws and the pores.”
From there, Floch Carbonel sold the look with subtle flourishes.
“Karla is really feminine, she’s got a really feminine face,” Floch Carbonel said. “She’s got feline eyes and she has a sexy, perfect mouth, sublime. We couldn’t go with another mouth. So I thought to myself that maybe a character like Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler’ could be a good in-between, the little tattoos, the fake tan, the long hair, the grill, it could go with a mouth that we couldn’t hide.”
Manitas’ overall look is powerful enough that most audiences think a male actor played the role, something Spadaccini takes pride in. “A couple of times, I must say, I had a very nice compliment — people saying to me they thought it was an actor who played [Manitas],” Spadaccini said. “So I was so happy to hear that.”
But though Emilia undergoes the most significant metamorphosis, Rita and Jessi (Selena Gomez) also grow and transform over the course of the film. Jessi’s initial look as the wife of a Mexican drug cartel leader was strongly Mexican before her years alone in Switzerland with her children leave their mark.
“Jacques wanted to express that she was a very free woman,” head hair designer Romain Marietti told IndieWire. “And that was expressed through the hair evolution. [Audiard] wanted to really emphasize this change, this big transformation. Going to Switzerland changed her, she’s on her own, and so she lost Mexico and the dark hair and really girly makeup; she goes really, really light. She’s now more European and more free in her representation and even I would say sexiness.”
The blonde hair also had to withstand the rigors of Damien Jalet’s choreography, as Floch Carbonel pointed out. “You can’t interrupt. It’s so focused,” she said of being unable to step in for touch-ups. “They are so focused. You can’t say, ‘Stop, I have to [adjust],’ you can’t.” So the team took into consideration the physical requirements of the characters (Floch Carbonel joked that, luckily, “They are perfect, so they don’t sweat”) as well as making sure the audience could trace their trajectories based on how they present themselves.
For Saldana’s Rita, the change in her circumstances from overlooked grunt employee in a law firm to chic woman of the world needed to be carefully communicated without overselling it. “Zoe’s transformation is more about having power and money,” Floch Carbonel said. “Because when she starts a film, she’s working for men, and she’s working a lot, but she’s not making money. Zoe, in real life, is someone really, really perfect. She’s sophisticated, she’s amazing. Even her body language is elegant, elegant, elegant, elegant. So we had to express [Rita’s difficulties]. We talked about prosthetics to make her gain some weight, but it’s not easy because the skin of Zoe is amazing and perfect, so everything shows.”
Instead, the team gave Rita bushy eyebrows, acne, undereye shadows and even a whisper of a mustache to convey her place in the world. “And then she goes through London,” Floch Carbonel said, “and she transitioned into a powerful lady.” That look ultimately softened in the musical’s final acts, when Rita and Emilia found La Lucecita to search for the victims of cartel violence. “And then she goes back to something more casual, really elegant,” Floch Carbonel said. “T-shirt-and-jeans simple — kind of a French lady, I would say.”
Sometimes, though, the needs of filmmaking took precedence, as when Saldana takes center stage for an unforgettable, rage-fueled internal monologue set to song at a fundraising gala. “We decided to tie the hair for her big dancing scene, because otherwise it was just not the same,” Marietti said. “It was going to be a bit tricky for her. Many decisions were actually made on the ground, testing things out. So I had to be involved and make decisions as well on the spot.”
“Emilia Pérez” is now streaming on Netflix.
