By Jazz Tangcay
Artisans Editor
SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses plot points in “The Deliverance,” now playing on Netflix.
“Nothing says evil like black sclera contact lenses.”
That was the key to Glenn Close’s devil-possessed transformation in Lee Daniels’ “The Deliverance.” In addition to the special lenses, Close spent four hours in the makeup chair, with special effects makeup artist Jason Collins at the helm.
Based on a true story, “The Deliverance” follows Ebony (Andra Day), a single mother taking care of her three kids (Caleb McLaughlin, Demi Singleton and Anthony B. Jenkins) and sick mother Alberta (Close) in a new house that seems to be haunted. As the story unfolds, the characters are tormented by demons. Alberta, who is undergoing chemo for cancer, gets possessed by the devil and becomes almost unrecognizable.
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With the possession coming towards the end, Collins didn’t just want to slap prosthetics on Close and lose the actress under all that makeup. “You want to identify that it’s Alberta. This is a connection the audience has had, and you don’t want to take them out of it,” he says.
But it all began with getting the demon eyes right, using black lenses. Collins was fully prepared to rely on VFX to correct everything digitally in post-production. But he asked Close if she would use black scleral contact lenses – a special lens that covers the white of the eye. “I asked her, ‘Do you think this is something you could do?’ And she’s such a great trooper and a great actress, and she said, ‘I’d like to try to do it practically if we can because I want to feel it.’ And we popped those suckers in there,” says Collins, adding that Close opted for the larger lens that covered the majority of the white of her eye.
Once Alberta’s demon eyes were in place, Collins says the character came to life and he centered the makeup around that. “We really brought out the cheekbones, and we did a lot of veining.”
The veining process of making her skin look translucent took up to two hours of airbrushing. Another two hours were spent on prosthetic application – eyebrow covers and a full neck application complete with saggy skin.
Close also needed a bald cap. Says Collins, “The bald cap was a two-piece cap – the back piece goes on first, and the front goes on over it. It already had hairs that had been individually punched in piece-by-piece.” He adds, “To get that bald cap ready, it took someone in my studio about three days to punch the hair in, one hair at a time.”
With Alberta’s teeth, Collins says it was important for audiences to know this was no longer Alberta but the demon. “In a scene like that, we wanted something that was really evidentiary and a quick read that it was demonic and evil,” says Collins.
Chris Lyons of Fangs FX, based in the U.K., made the teeth. “We sent him over a design, and he went bigger and chunkier than I normally would. But when I showed Lee the teeth, he went with that set because they read so quickly.”
Other minute details that helped Close’s devilish transformation were long toenails – an idea that she came up with. Lee loved the idea but wanted extra. “He said, ‘Long fungus-ridden toenails.’ Nothing says demon like that,” says Collins. “So we went to town on the toenails.”
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