About face: ‘A Different Man’ makeup artist Mike Marino on transforming pretty boys and surfacing dualities

On the cusp of Oscar Sunday, we’re talking award-winning makeup that gets under the skin.

Mike Marino is a storyteller. And his medium is makeup. 

For nearly 25 years, Marino has been designing makeup for films and television series like Saturday Night Live, Black Swan, I Am Legend, and True Detective. His work is both hyper-realistic and imaginative. He can encapsulate a character’s backstory while communicating their current desires using just silicone, latex, and other practical effects.

The past few years have been particularly fruitful for Marino. He designed the makeup for Colin Farrell’s critically lauded, virtually unrecognizable portrayal of the Penguin (née Oswald Cobb) in 2022’s The Batman and the 2024 HBO spinoff series The Penguin. Farrell has credited Marino’s makeup for giving him “license to inhabit a character” in a way he’s never been able to before. That permission has paid off. In just the first two months of 2025, Farrell has won a Golden Globe, a Critic’s Choice Award, and a SAG Award for his performance.

Marino himself has earned three Oscar nominations since 2021, the latest being for Aaron Schimberg’s 2024 noir comedy-horror A Different Man. The film follows Edward, a struggling New York actor played by Sebastian Stan. Edward has neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that often causes facial disfigurement. Edward undergoes an experimental treatment that destroys the tumors on his face, revealing Stan’s conventional handsomeness underneath. Edward and his new face form a new identity that is equal parts banal and unfulfilling. He soon meets the self-assured Oswald, played by Adam Pearson, a British actor who actually has neurofibromatosis. Oswald’s charm and full embrace of his condition throws Edward into a freewheeling quest to reclaim what he’s lost.

Marino was tasked with designing a realistic, sensitive portrayal of neurofibromatosis for Stan’s Edward, using Pearson’s face as a model. He joins us ahead of Oscar Sunday to discuss his inspirations and ways of drawing the inside, out. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

Alexis Haut: I’ve read in a couple different places that you were inspired to become a makeup designer after watching David Lynch’s The Elephant Man when you were a kid. What about that specific movie inspired you? 

Mike Marino: I saw The Elephant Man when I was four, and it was on HBO constantly during the day. I happened to watch that movie multiple times, and I obviously didn’t understand what the hell was going on, but I saw John Merrick’s face, and I was super afraid of it. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know what it was about. I thought it was just like a monster or something. 

And then Michael Jackson’s Thriller came around and that was kind of like, okay, I can tell it’s makeup — it’s a werewolf. It doesn’t exist. And they show Rick Baker gluing the makeup on, and he’s explaining how he makes this stuff. And I was just totally obsessed. 

So I rewatched The Elephant Man many years later and realized that it was so beautiful, and it said such an incredible thing. A Different Man, it’s a comedic version of that type of thing. And I just think it was a huge influence for me and that full-circle thing where I get to do my own sort of version of The Elephant Man. 

AH: The visuals of disfigured faces linger on the screen throughout A Different Man. So as a viewer, we are like you watching The Elephant Man as a child. We have to ask ourselves, “How do I feel about this image? Am I afraid? Am I uncomfortable?” And I think that’s what is so effective about the makeup for Edward. I’m curious, when you take on a job to design makeup for a character like Edward, what does that research process look like?

MM: It basically depends on what the film wants to say. I treat what I need to build for it differently. But I’m always looking at real references, no matter how fantasized it is. For instance, with A Different Man, I had to make Edward look enough like Adam Pearson himself, but make it work for Sebastian. Even though Adam Pearson was the inspiration behind [Edward’s makeup], I had to change it a bit and make it a little bit more, you know, crazier because he’s scabbing and he’s picking at it, and he’s peeling pieces of his skin off, and it’s irritated looking. Adam has very smooth, smooth skin. But I had to change that for Edward. 

And plus, it was shot on 16 millimeter, which is very grainy. And you don’t really pick up a lot of color. Those factors play into the design of the whole thing. But when I first met with Sebastian, I scanned him in, I lifecasted him. I took a lot of photographs of him making expressions and seeing where his own wrinkles were forming and what I could get away with. And, you know, matching his skin tone in silicone. 

And then I start the sculpture process, which is basically gathering all these photographs and images of people with this disease, looking at Adam, and I hadn’t met Adam yet, and I had to really go off photographs. So I’m relying on all these things around me, surrounding my work table with all this reference, and I’m just putting on cool music, putting on cool movies and stuff in the background. 

I have to get myself into the mode to work and to make something. And then I’ve got to start the sculpting process, which is the heart of the whole prosthetic build. This is where you take pieces of clay and you’re like, manipulating it onto the lifecast of Sebastian. And so I’m kind of saying, how far can I push it? Then I start doing all the hand details, like the skin texture. Then all these technical processes follow that with mold making and casting and silicone and all these things. And then I airbrush all the different colorations and veins and blood vessels and all the things that go into real skin. And then we glue that makeup on to Sebastian every morning. It takes a couple of hours. 

AH: In A Different Man, the makeup is also designed to come apart. Edward undergoes a transformation where his face literally melts off to reveal a tumor-free Sebastian Stan underneath. Tumors are collapsing and there’s blood and moisture oozing out. How did you decide to depict that destruction? 

MM: Aaron [Schimberg], in his writing of the film, wanted to eliminate this person. I thought it would be cool to create a cocoon, this worm is turning into a butterfly or something, and it leaves this skin behind, you know? And so I thought it was cool that he was shedding his skin. It was coming off, and there was something else beautiful emerging out of it. Even though you ultimately realize that the beautiful thing has no personality. It’s an illusion. It doesn’t get better. It gets worse. So it’s really a metaphor for self and what lengths people go to to self-destruct their own image to become something that they think they want to be, but they can’t be, or actually make themselves worse. 

AH: A Different Man mixes so many genres. It’s comedy. It’s noir. It’s body horror. Along the lines, I’d like to switch gears to The Penguin. Obviously, there’ve been so many canonical depictions of the Penguin both on screen and in comic books. They range from the absurd Danny DeVito Penguin to the more realistic depiction in the show Gotham. How did you decide where to land with Colin Farrell’s makeup in his depiction of the Penguin/Oswald Cobb? 

MM: If you look at Frank Miller’s Dark Knight comic book, which was in the 80s, it’s really a hyper-realistic noir, older, beat up, injured Batman-type thing. That’s a little bit of the world we’re in now. We’re in a world of Gotham City where it’s dangerous and scary, and it’s very realistic. I love the makeup that Stan Winston and his team did for Danny DeVito in Batman Returns. It’s iconic. It’s Danny DeVito. He’s got freaky hands and stuff. 

But you couldn’t do that in this movie. This had to be a gangster. He’s a mafia person who’s trying to come up in the world. And why would they call him the Penguin? Does he waddle around? Does he have an injury? And what is that injury? I just thought about what would happen in the real world — if he has a nose that looks like a beak, someone might make fun of him for it. 

I mimic the shape of the mouth of a beak. The line in between the two halves of a penguin’s beak is what I used as the nostril shape on the side of the beat-up version of the Penguin, and I split his face in two, almost like a split personality. Because in The Penguin series and in the movie, he is a kind person. And then he’s this fucking brutal killer. And I thought it was important to depict that on the face because I’m also telling a story about who he is in this tone of the film with his face, with the skin, you know? I am a storyteller as well — I’m telling a story with nothing but an image.

AH: What do you think makeup’s role is in inspiring viewer empathy for a character? I was feeling all sorts of it for Oswald Cobb, even though he was a pretty terrible guy. 

MM: I think it’s because our emotions are tied to physical form. You know how we see a puppy, and we immediately go like, “Oh my God, you’re so cute! I love you, want to pick you up, and hug you.” And then when you see a rat or a cockroach, you want to kill it, you know? Form is attached to emotion or emotional response, so you can play with those things. You can play with the shapes, like what makes a puppy cute? What are the shapes of an insect or a rat or something ugly? What are the shapes that create our subconscious feeling towards it? So my job is to find what emotional level some character is on so that I can use those natural shapes to determine how I want someone to perceive them.

AH: How did Colin respond when he first saw your design?

MM: So Matt Reeves (director of 2022’s The Batman) and Colin Farrell loved my idea. And then Colin put on the makeup and all this stuff came out. His walk, his demeanor, those things that are ethereal and things that can only really happen when your face and body are changed. 

Computer graphics are amazing, but they’re not alive. The actor can’t wear them. That’s another form of acting — it’s really going into this other realm of experimentation because you’re actually living like Sebastian Stan did as Edward and like Colin did as Oswald. When you’re a totally different person and your appearance is totally different, things happen that you wouldn’t normally plan. 

AH: It seems to be no accident that Colin Farrell and Sebastian Stan are both actors who are conventionally handsome and whose previous roles have relied on that. 

MM: I can’t personally take credit for improving their acting skills. But they’ll tell you that they’ve been able to go places that they weren’t able to as themselves. So it’s kind of this fusion of artists living inside of a character that only exists in film. 

AH: Are there certain characteristics or skills an actor needs to carry off that level of transformative makeup? 

MM: They have to be bold, and they have to be confident in their own abilities. Because when you’re not relying on your charm or your looks or anything, you’re at square one. You’re floating in this space of talent and the script and what you can do with acting. You can’t be Sebastian Stan anymore. You can’t be Colin Farrell. You’re unrecognizable. So you have to rely on talent, emotion, skill, soul.