When Poor Things hair, makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey began crafting the prosthetic looks for Willem Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter, her goal was not to make him look like a monster. Rather, she wanted him to look like there was a man underneath all the injuries that his father inflicted upon him with medical experiments when he was a child.
“It was one of the hardest things of the whole filming process for me because with Baxter, we were designing something that we hadn’t seen before,” Stacey tells THR. She worked with prosthetic artists Mark Coulier and Josh Weston for about a month on developing the mad scientist’s look. Once the team nailed down Baxter’s face the way director Yorgos Lanthimos had envisioned it, with five silicone pieces and a hair-punch piece around his ear, it would take about two hours and 40 minutes every day to get Dafoe ready for filming.
