In the first ten minutes of Hulu’s “La Máquina” — the streamer’s first-ever
Spanish-language series — you see a bizarrely coiffed, overly tanned, vainglorious man in a suit who’s known for wheeling and dealing in what looks like a 1980s cocaine fever dream. (Comparisons to a certain POTUS are merely coincidental.) But you’re actually looking at actor Diego Luna (“Andor“), who reunites with his “Y tu mamá también” costar Gael García Bernal to play Andy Lujan, a boxing manager who ramps up the career of his best friend, Esteban (García Bernal), a local Mexican pugilist suffering a slump, and embroils them in criminal chaos in the process.
Luna, typically a beatific presence even in the darkest of narratives, is close to unrecognizable as the tousled, eccentric rich mama’s boy who gets in over his head. “We wanted everything to look natural,” hair and makeup designer Alejandra Velarde said, “so when we [originally] put the cheeks on, he didn’t look natural at all. He looked like a cartoon.”
To remedy the situation, Velarde and her team called upon Emmy-winning prosthetics designer Pepe Mora (“The Mandalorian”) to create something that would play realistically to the audience, a tough feat since this is a character who applies tanning lotion like moisturizer and is fond of surgical procedures and Botox. (See the video just below for a time-lapse rendering of Luna’s process.)
“I thought that [the facial components] needed to be separate pieces, and the
prosthetics needed to work separately because I had no time for a makeup test,”
said Mora, who created a blended look that could stand up to the show’s many
close-ups as well as to the unforgiving 4K and higher resolutions.
“The most challenging thing I will say about all these processes is the stress of prosthetics and taking care of the skin, because also they need to breathe through the skin,” he said. “So after removing the makeup, we have a little bit of skincare
[routine], a little bit of spa, ten minutes or so with Diego just taking care of
his skin.”
The process took anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours depending on the
needs of the day, and Mora seems delighted by the suggestion that even though
the show is fictional and set in the fairly recent past, Luna looks startlingly
like late-era Mickey Rourke, hair and all.
“We wanted to show that tension between control and distortion,” said the designer, who confirmed that Rourke was indeed a visual barometer, along with the lead singer of famous Mexican rock act Mana, often whispered about on chat boards for looking a little nipped and tucked. “You’re supposed to see them in a slightly unnatural state, but it has to look natural,” Velarde said. “It’s not easy to find full references for male plastic surgery,” Mora added, noting that putting the pieces together created a sort of Mr. Potato Head concept.”
But Luna was game to go all the way on the series. Velarde has worked with him for more than eight years on projects including “Narcos: Mexico” and his upcoming directorial adaptation of Brenda Navarro’s novel “A Mouthful of Ash.”
“Everyone was kind and professional and always brought great energy to the makeup trailers,” she said. “We became a real family.”
And both artists were grateful to work on a project centered on a patently
Mexican story and backdrop, a landscape still not explored enough in limited
series. “It makes me really proud as a Mexican,” Velarde said. “It’s powerful
because it shows that we have the talent, the vision and that ability to create
work that can stand on a global stage, knowing that what you’re doing can
travel far beyond our borders.”
A version of this story first ran in the Limited Series & TV Movies issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
