Göran Lundström has got to be one of the most brilliant makeup artists on earth. With credits including The Batman and True Detective, Lundström is up for an Oscar for turning the ever-handsome Jared Leto into Paolo Gucci, and perhaps had you not known Leto was playing him beforehand, you would have wondered to yourself where they found the wild guy who played Paolo. This, of course, was by design, with Lundström explaining:
“At the beginning, I didn’t realize that Jared did not want to look like himself at all.” According to Lundström this is pretty rare. “Most of the times they want you to see that it’s an actor in makeup. It took a while to figure out that Jared didn’t want to see himself in the makeup. That he wanted to be totally unrecognizable.”
This effort took something like four hours a day to happen, with everyone making sure Leto’s character never actually looked like he was wearing prosthetics, which would have been a dead giveaway, and is indeed a trap many actors have fallen into recently.
House of Gucci just came out on Blu-ray/DVD, and it’s worth checking out if you haven’t seen it. Ridley Scott’s always been one of the best directors out there, and this year he made not one but two really good movies (with my beloved The Last Duel being another).
You can pick up House of Gucci right here. Let us know in the comments what you thought of Leto’s transformation.