Oscar-winning prosthetic makeup artist Kazu Hiro has been in the industry for over 30 years. He’s transformed Bradley Cooper, Gary Oldman, Charlize Theron and, most recently, Dwayne Johnson in “The Smashing Machine.” This year, he was tasked with transforming Tom Cruise in “Digger,” in which Cruise plays a Texas oil tycoon. But this isn’t the Cruise audiences are typically familiar with — the dashing Hollywood movie star who jumps off cliffs and hangs off airplane wings.
No, Digger is an aged man with jowls, thinning hair, a disheveled appearance and a belly. The film is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and also stars Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and Sandra Hüller and follows Digger, whose company causes a potential global catastrophe. That transformation could have taken hours — six to be precise.
Except Cruise didn’t want to spend that long in the makeup chair putting prosthetics on. He was convinced the team could do it faster, and Hiro did. He pulled it off, finding a way to streamline the process.
Hiro spoke with Variety about his process and how he transformed Cruise into the oil baron. My agent called me and said Alejandro wanted to talk to me about this project. I wanted to read the script before I met him, and I read it and it was amazing, with a great story.
We had a conversation, but he’s supposed to be an oil tycoon. At that time, he was around 76 years old, much older than the final look. I went to see Tom in London, and we had a meeting with him and Alejandro — it was an open idea at the time.
He was on a tight schedule because he was shooting “Mission Impossible,” but we set up time to do a 3D scan, live caps and photographs and I started to sculpt. Alejandro liked the first design. As I was about to finish the sculpture and started to make a mold of each piece, he called and said, “Digger should be 67 years old.” So, I took another look and finished that in a few weeks.
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