'Jules' Makeup Artist Reveals How Alien Was Created Without CGI, Talks Prosthetics Worn by Stunt Actress
The new indie movie Jules is now in theaters and it has been winning over audiences for the past few days since its release!
The sci-fi comedy has an 85% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the audience score is even better at 91%.
Jules follows Milton (Ben Kingsley) who lives a quiet life of routine in a small western Pennsylvania town, but finds his day upended when a UFO and its extra-terrestrial passenger crash land in his backyard. Before long, Milton develops a close relationship with the extra-terrestrial he calls “Jules.” Things become complicated when two neighbors (Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin) discover Jules and the government quickly closes in.
Director Marc Turtletaub chose to have a stunt actor wear makeup and prosthetics to play Jules instead of using CGI to create the alien!
Keep reading to find out more…
Makeup department head Joshua Turi told EW that his team used 11 individual prosthetics to create Jules’ look and none of the pieces were reusable, so new ones had to be made every day. While the filmmakers hoped to film all of Jules’ scenes in 12-15 days, it actually took 30 days to film all of the scenes.
“Jules has such a presence in this that I don’t know if it would’ve worked better as a fully digital character,” Turi said. “Having her alive there in the makeup, doing this and that, it just works. It’s what we needed.”
The alien is meant to be “genderless” and the role was played by stunt actress Jade Quon.
“This is probably one of the most difficult makeups we’ve done,” Turi said. “There’s not a wrinkle, there’s not a scratch, there’s not a hair; there’s nothing… I’ll say that this was probably the toughest makeup we’ve ever done. There’s other jobs that are tougher builds. This was a tough build, don’t get me wrong — it’s a lot of different pieces of scope, a lot of different pieces of mold. So, I’m putting Jules right up there.”
Watch the trailer below!