House of Gucci Makeup Artist Says Jared Leto Wanted To Be Unrecognizable

Leto’s total transformation into the Gucci family black sheep for the Ridley Scott project was enough to earn makeup artist Göran Lundström the film’s only Oscar nomination this year.

The Swedish makeup artist spoke to Reporter Door about the process of turning the “Suicide Squad” actor into Paolo Gucci and the creative use of time and prosthetic design to bring Leto’s vision to life in just three weeks.

First of all, congratulations on your Oscar nomination. How does it feel you have your work recognized and have any cast members reached out to congratulate you?

Well, this job, this movie was a little bit different. Since we did such a quick job, it’s even more surprising to us to get nominated. I remember saying on set — because we were trying to catch up all the time — we were saying, ‘God it’s not going to get a nomination, that’s for sure.’ So that’s even more fun that with so many obstacles to overcome, we still managed to do something that people really appreciate. It’s harder for us to see it because we still see the issues we were struggling with, but we’re starting to appreciate it differently because other people appreciate it so much. It’s really fun to be nominated for this.

Were you surprised the film didn’t get more Oscar love?

Yeah, definitely. The thing [is] when you’re waiting to hear about an Oscar nomination like this, you’re focused on if you’re going to get one or not. As soon as I know I got the word that we got the nomination, my phone started ringing so I never got to see the rest of the nominations. So I was told afterwards that they didn’t get any more nominations, which just was surprising because I was pretty sure that at least Lady Gaga [would] get one. I was hoping Jared would get one, but you never know with the Oscars how it’s gonna go. It’s really — it’s hard to predict.

When you were contacted about working on the film, what was your initial reaction to learning Jared Leto wanted to transform into Paolo Gucci — just knowing what an undertaking that would be?

I’m based in Sweden. I work on a lot of international movies like big Hollywood movies, but I’m still based in Sweden and I don’t normally get these kind of phone calls. But when a big actor wants me to design something — I have worked on a lot of big makeup so for me, I tried to not think too much about all the hurdles that I was going to have with not enough time and a lot of [other] factors. I was also, you know, recognizing the fact that here’s a big actor [who] wants to be changed into someone and that’s gonna take a lot of effort and a lot of thought to get it to look right, which is the challenge. You really want to transform someone and [it’s] even harder to transform someone into a believable person.

A lot of times we get asked about doing old-age makeup and old-age makeup is so difficult because it’s up to the face of the actor and you can actually age [them] improperly. It’s just easier on some actors. This was not an aging job, what is even more interesting it was not a fat makeup job. It was just changing the character of a very well known face, which is scary, especially when you think about him acting with Al Pacino and other actors in no prosthetic makeup and it’s also even scarier when you want to do it for a drama, because the ‘uncanny valley’ thing you can end up with — which means that you feel that something is off with the character — it works better if it’s genre movie like, fantasy or horror, but for a drama, it has to be totally believable and that’s even harder. But I think it’s a dream project in the sense that this doesn’t come along often, but it wasn’t a dream situation because it came so late. I think a lot [of] other makeup artists were asked about it, but they turned it down because the circumstances weren’t the best.

Can you talk a little about the creative process when it comes to working with Jared directly to get Paolo’s look just right? Did you feel more pressure to get the look just right since you were modeling Leto after a real person?

Oh, well this was very much Jared Leto’s idea and concept you know, I worked directly with him. [… Jared and I] were in constant conversation about this. I was sculpting versions of it. You know, you pretty quickly end up in a place where you feel that it looks good. And I told him that, you know, looking at Paolo Gucci, we didn’t try to portray Paolo Gucci per se. We were looking at what kind of character Paolo Gucci is and I tried to make a character that’s like a cousin of Paolo Gucci. Someone who looks and feels [like] that public image but isn’t necessarily someone you know, it’s not an absolute portrait. […] I told Jared if you want to look different, if you don’t want to look like yourself, if you don’t want to be recognized — his jawline is very sharp, you know, he [has a] very crisp jawline, I said we have to get rid of that.

Basically what you do is you sculpt everything in clay — it’s like old-fashioned stuff. We even had a head scan of him that we worked on because we didn’t get to meet Jared until the first test maker. So that was scary as well.

His eyes are very particular as well, but those are more difficult. You don’t want to mess with the eyes too much. That’s when it can start looking a little bit strange. So we stayed away from the eyes, but I did want to change the facial shape as much as I could to get away from what Jared looks like. And then you add certain things to help us make some changes because he didn’t want to be recognized that was the big thing as well. A lot of actors want to be recognized but they want to look more like a character. Jared didn’t want to be recognized. It took a while for me to understand it but he was saying like, ‘I can still see my nose in this nose.’ You know, like he could still see part of him.

And I think for him it was important that he wouldn’t recognize himself or maybe it wasn’t as important for him to be recognized by other people but he at least didn’t want to feel like himself which is rare. So the greater process was basically me just not thinking about how difficult this is, because that’s the worst. I was just trying not to think about, ‘What do I have to do to make this work?’ I only have this much time and then I spent half that time thinking about not being stressed. So you’re trying to have to put yourself in a state of mind where you can do the job without thinking about all the mistakes that can happen and all the things that can go wrong. You don’t want to dream about how it’s going to look bad.

About how many hours a day was Jared in the makeup chair and what was the most challenging aspect of the transformation?

The makeup was really long! The thing is that Jared at the time turned 50, but he doesn’t have hair like a 50-year-old. It’s nothing about him that looks like a 50-year-old, he looks so young. His hair is so thick and so long, I’ve never seen a man with such long hair. We were trying to turn him into a bald person with all that hair underneath which was really tricky and it actually added over an hour. I think it added an hour and a half, just because of the fact that we have that hair to hide. So the makeup did change time-wise, I think we ended up with trying to get it down to like three and a half hours but I don’t think we ever ended up there. I think we managed to get it down to like just four hours but it was different from day to day.

We also took some breaks, then it’s really hard to know how much time you have. But I do think that we had a lot more time with Jared before he was needed on set. You know, he made sure there was even more time. So we could spend those four-to-something hours not stressed to go to set so he had some time afterwards as well. But it was really long makeup. It’s very rare, and I don’t particularly like to do makeup for that long but there was nothing we could do about it. We also got straight into that makeup without practice. A lot of times you get to figure out the makeup and then it goes faster, but I don’t think we ever got there. Towards the end, we figured it out but it still took long. Physically the challenge for Jared is sitting still for four hours. It’s really hard.

We put glue in his hair, we put glue on his forehead, we put glue on his whole face.  basically his forehead and his upper lip where his mustache was — that’s the part of him we didn’t cover so he was covered with glue all over and just having that on your face is tough. I do think that he did the best with it. I’ve never seen anyone act so, you know, being so expressive with [these] kind of things on his face in an actual way. He just looked like it wasn’t there. And I was even surprised, you know, when I saw the film. Wow. You know, I saw him act on set but we weren’t always in the same room, but I was still surprised. I was really amazed.