Christopher Abbott Felt ‘Trapped’ in His ‘Wolf Man’ Prosthetics: ‘It’s a Mental Marathon’
Christopher Abbott was ready to shed his “Wolf Man” prosthetics.
The actor told The Hollywood Reporter that for the Universal monster movie, he realized just how taxing wearing prosthetics can be.
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“It looks beautiful, and I’m grateful that we did real prosthetics. The film is all the better for it,” Abbott said. “But yeah, man, it’s tedious and arduous. It takes hours, and then you have to go shoot. Just wearing the prosthetics for hours is more tiring than you think.”
He added, “Parts of the prosthetics are heavy, and they weigh you down. Physically, you feel like you’re trapped a little bit, so it’s a mental marathon as well.”
However, Abbott also looked to the prosthetics during his transformation into the titular werewolf to inform his acting style in each scene.
“The good thing is that there were specific prosthetic stages,” he said. “So, whatever tracking I had to do on my own and in my own brain was easily remembered based on what prosthetics I was wearing that day. I was like, ‘Oh, right. When I look this way, I’m at this level.’ So it was a team effort in terms of tracking that stuff.”
Abbott added, “It changed how I would act without any prosthetics or makeup. How one would convey sadness or anger changes when you have prosthetics. So you have to be a little bit bigger in terms of what you do with your face underneath, but that’s really it. I was just excited to be able to focus on the physical more. It’s definitely the most physical role I’ve done in that way, or it’s the most [physical] work I’ve had to do. It forces your brain to think differently and approach things differently. For anything else, I would never look in the mirror and practice my lines, but for ‘Wolf Man,’ because of the prosthetics, you have to see how your face moves underneath the prosthetics and what it conveys. So I thought that was interesting.”
Read IndieWire’s “Wolf Man” review here.
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