It took 7 hours for the first application of the elephant man’s makeup, which was done by famous makeup artist Wally Schneiderman. With practice, the time dropped to “only” 3 or 4 hours; But the shooting days were already 12 hours long, adding more than 3 hours to Hurt’s makeup removal.

So he worked only every other day, and sometimes every third day. In other words, they were tortured… He even fell asleep while sitting on the set, like his character, to save time and not repeat this ordeal every day…

Show your face as late as possible

If David Lynch clearly wanted to reveal John Merrick’s face and severely deformed body rather quickly, the actor was more inclined to postpone its revelation until later in the film.

“David wanted to show me the Elephant Man make-up in the film earlier than I wanted. I thought the longer we waited to show it fully, the better. We were so far behind with makeup that we were still working during filming. I would do scenes in disguise, then go straight to Old Kent Road Working with Chris.

I tried to dissuade him by saying, “Don’t finish too quickly, because we have another series next week that I would love to do. Partly because the disguise was incredibly successful. People remember that.”

Despite his eight nominations, including Best Actor for John Hurt, elephant man During the 1981 ceremony, the Academy Awards were scandalously ignored. Absence was undoubtedly more shocking: recognition of extraordinary work on make-up did not receive an award.

But there is a reason for this: the award category did not officially exist. This followed an outcry on the subject elephant man That category would see the light of day the following year, awarding Rick Baker’s fabulous The Werewolf of London. So Lynch’s film unfortunately suffered a blow…