Hidden Heroes by Lara DeLosh
FACE VALUE
AW'S makeup artist Kevin Bennett was more than up to the challenge of creating the Beast of Bay City
MAKEUP ARTIST KEVIN BENNETT HAD TO DO A LITTLE more than think about foundation and rouge when presented with the task of creating the disfigured face of Another World's Jordan Stark. "We had parameters," he notes. "The show wanted him to be deformed but not grotesque--a romantic disfigurement, like the beast from the television show Beauty and the Beast. Someone that even with their deformity, they were sort of sexy."
Easier said than done. For frame of reference, Bennett created the backstory that Jordan's appearance "is based on a birth defect or, for whatever reason, hormonally the face's muscle tissue continued to grow," he explains. "What we would like people to believe is that the scars are residual effects of attempted surgeries to correct the deformed areas."
Bennett researched birth defects and watched films like The Elephant Man. "I also went on the Internet and got pictures from the old Beauty and the Beast show," he says. "I took what I liked from the stuff I gathered and added it to the renderings I did, saw what I didn't like and took it out, until we got what we wanted. Then I scanned one of David's (David Andrew Macdonald, who plays Jordan) 8-by-10s into the computer, and started messing with it in Photoshop. When I finally got the basic shot the way I liked it, I worked on it with charcoal, to shade and deepen, and add scarring. I had all kinds of disfigurement on the lower part of his face, to disfigurement on the upper part of the face. We decided to run it diagonally across the face--the left brow area is very exaggerated and there is a similar type of situation on the right cheekbone--so that it looks interesting from whichever angle they shoot him."
After getting the green light for the final product, prosthetics were fashioned from a cast of Macdonald's face. The first attempt, however, didn't work quite the way Bennett had hoped. "We changed the makeup totally after we did the original test because it wasn't showing up in dimmer light," Bennett says. "In person, we thought it looked magnificent--exactly what we wanted, but when we got it on camera it didn't look as bad as we wanted it to. So we exaggerated a bit more, went back into the lab and created new pieces.
"There are two latex pieces, and 70 percent of the face is covered," Bennett continues. "One piece starts at the hairline, covers about two-thirds of the forehead, goes down the center of his nose, underneath his eyebrow and into the crease of his eye. Then it extends down along the side of his face to his cheekbone. It is a big piece. The other piece starts in the crease of his other eye, to his sideburn and then all down in back, over his upper lip and most of his lower lip. I wouldn't want to be claustrophobic and have to wear these pieces."
The latex is a pale, flesh color, "and all the skin tones and textures and scars are painted in once the pieces are put on the actor," Bennett adds. "It is quite an undertaking, and David has been unbelievably wonderful. It isn't easy to sit in a chair for an hour and a half while people glue latex foam to your face. When all is said and done it takes a half-hour to 45 minutes to get all the stuff off him."
Time is of the essence when preparing Macdonald for taping. "Jordan is a very important character on the canvas of the show right now, so we are doing full-fledged special-effect prosthetic work here at least three to four times a week--almost like doing Deep Space Nine or a Voyager type of show," Bennett says. "To make the makeup application to his face film quality, where you could put him in very bright lighting and shoot him very close, it could take four to five hours. We are not afforded that kind of time, so what we do is basically a really nice clean job, and the days where we have to do close-ups, we have to factor in extra time."
Bennett--who has been a makeup artist for more than 15 years and has worked with such cosmetic companies as Chanel and Estee Lauder--admits that tackling this project has been his biggest challenge since joining AW in 1994. "This is something I never dreamed could happen on daytime," he says. "This is the kind of stuff you get to do on prime time and film. Normally on daytime you get a one-shot deal here and there, but you never get the opportunity to do really cool work like this continuously. This has allowed me to hone my special-effects skills, and challenge myself by trying different techniques. How can I do better? How can I do it faster? There are even procedures now that I play with, that I augment and change. By mixing and matching, and getting out my little Easy Bake oven to cook up new ideas and creepy crawlers, this has added a whole new level to my work here."