Shaved Heads and Vanicream: Torsten Witte on Transforming Emma Stone for ‘Bugonia’

“I wanted Michelle to be unapproachable and expensive,” Witte tells The Set Set. In a bid to translate this cold and detached persona, Witte first hid Michelle’s face from viewers using a Deesse Pro LED mask, which costs a cool $1,700. When finally revealing her face, he avoided trendy looks because Michelle wouldn’t need to follow trends; she’s too rich to care. He landed on a timeless, soft, smoky cat eye with a cool lip tone, which he purposefully picked to make her seem cold and guarded. His weapon of choice was The Black Lip Balm by Finding Ferdinand: a no-fuss formula that can be applied on the go – ideal for a busy CEO. 

Michelle’s skin itself needed to look “perfect” and healthy – we see her use an expensive LED mask, after all – which meant eschewing the full coverage, heavy formulas that you might associate with long days spent on set. Instead, Witte reached for skin-enhancing formulas like Isamaya’s Skinlacq, which hydrates skin and leaves a dewy finish with subtle gold sparkles; and Charlotte Tilbury’s Tint Stick, which gently evens skin tone without looking cakey or matte. 

Though Stone first came to set with a bob, Michelle’s hair was long and luscious thanks to clip-in hair extensions. It sounds easy, but he tried multiple lengths before finding the perfect number: “We ended up with 18 inches. We worked our way down, longer and longer until it felt right.” To maintain a “chic and elegant” look, he opted for a ’70s-style  blowout as neat and as formal as her personality. There wasn’t any direction or brief behind this look, but it felt “clear” to Witte that Michelle would have long hair. Requiring financial commitment in the form of upkeep, styling, and expensive products or treatments, long hair can be a sign of wealth, especially if it’s dyed an unnatural color like Michelle’s deep auburn shade. “We used two tones to create a soft highlight that read better on camera,” Witte explains. “I didn’t want it to look flat and solid.”

Stone is completely bald as a prisoner, having had her hair cruelly shorn by her captors. Witte and Stone attempted multiple makeup tests using a bald cap, but it just wouldn’t work: “It takes two to three hours every day to do a cap, and that would just cut Yorgos’ shooting time by two hours. He was like, ‘This is not an option, you're shaving your head!’ It’s a bold move to shave your head for a character, especially as someone who hops from movie to movie. It’s an investment; you’re in it for the long haul.”

This explains why Witte needed to use wigs during flashback scenes. “A bald head is difficult,” he admits. “You can’t go back once you’ve shaved your head. The hair’s gone for the rest of the movie.”

To keep Stone’s bald cut looking fresh, Witte shaved her scalp every evening. “We got into this routine: when we did clean-up at night, I’d shave her head so that she could shower at home.” The nighttime shave also gave Stone’s skin time to calm down, and Witte didn’t have to spend the day removing fallen shavings. “I despise nothing more than chasing little stubbles.”

Later, we see Stone’s imprisoned character smothered in ‘antihistamine cream’, which her captors liberally apply to stop her from communicating with other aliens via her skin. This posed multiple problems for Witte: he first needed to find a cream that Stone could wear, thickly, for hours on end without breaking out. And he needed something that wouldn’t absorb right away, showing up as white on camera. “We had so many camera tests and tried so many creams,” he reveals. Finally, they landed on a cocktail of La Roche Posay’s Cicaplast Balm B5 and Vanicream’s Moisturizing Cream, which they tested for five nights before concluding she wouldn’t break out. “The ingredients worked well for her skin and wouldn’t dry her out, burn, or make her red underneath,” Witte notes. Depending on what time it was in Michelle’s story, Witte would use different ratios of cream, even sometimes adding white foundation. “When her character had just woken up, it needed to look sunken in. When she was engaged in heated conversations, I made it look more shiny.”

Though Michelle is held captive, Witte didn’t want to lose her powerful persona: “There is a power struggle and you see the dynamic shifting. One minute she's in charge, then [her captor] is in charge. I didn't want her to look like the victim in the basement. I still wanted her to look strong.” To get this across, he messily applied red lipstick on her. “The mouth becomes essential. She’s like, listen to what I have to say. It felt right with a lip on. With no lip and the white makeup, she looked more defeated. Her character was getting lost.”

You might be thinking: but when would she have time to apply lipstick while held captive in a basement? “Yorgos doesn’t necessarily care about continuity or reality,” says Witte. In this instance, the symbolism and art of the red lip was far more important than fact.