Bombshell: Perfecting the Fox News look
Thursday, January 23, 2020 at 1:00PM 
Regardless of Bombshell's many problematic elements, there's one element that nearly everyone agrees is worthy of praise. We're referring to the astounding transformation of its cast into the famous faces of Fox News. Since the first teaser trailer dropped, many have marvelled at Charlize Theron's uncanny resemblance to Megyn Kelly. It's a remarkable feat of cinematic transfiguration that was made possible by the work of an Oscar-nominated makeup team as well as Colleen Atwood's clever use of costuming.
The movie has a limited view of the social and political insidiousness of Fox News, but, as it happens with many surface-level wonders, its look is on-point…
;)
When it came to turning Charlize Theron into the former Fox News anchor, the filmmakers hired one of Hollywood's greatest masters of transformative makeup. Kazu Hiro, also known as Kazuhiro Tsuji, is a Japanese special makeup effects artist that started working behind the cameras in 1989. A fan and disciple of the great Dick Smith, he has amassed a rich filmography full of insane feats of prosthetic shapeshifting, ranging from the simian overlords of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes to the Darkest Hour's Winston Churchill.
It was Gary Oldman who convinced the makeup wizard to return to cinema after Kazu Hiro had turned his back on Hollywood to pursue a career as a visual artist. This comeback to tinsel town earned him his third Oscar nomination (he was previously nominated for 2006's Click and 2007's Norbit) as well as his first win.
This year, he's once again in the running for gold and is a favorite to win for the way he so uncannily molded Charlize Theron's face into the recognizable angularity of Megyn Kelly's.
According to many interviews and featurettes, it wasn't a simple affair and it took many tries until the right combination of prosthetics was achieved. One of the weirdest and most difficult elements to get right was Kelly's heavy eyelids. In fact, through the shooting Kazu Hiro kept tweaking them and changing their overall design. Another issue was the application of the Fox News mask of heavy makeup over the actress' metamorphized visage. Prosthetics and real skin take on cosmetics in different ways, making the perfection of the news anchor look a technical nightmare.
;)
If you watch some Fox News footage (don't do it, if only for the sake of your sanity), you'll notice a uniformity of appearance across all on-screen women. There's a very specific look to them, which includes heavy glamour makeup and overly styled blond tresses. Throughout Bombshell's narrative, we can see the chronology of this corporate stylistic evolution. There's Nicole Kidman's Gretchen Carlson with her old-school helmet hairdo and then we have the more Instagram-friendly glow of Margot Robbie's fictional Kayla Pospisil.
This last transformation is not Kazu Hiro's doing. He took care of the prosthetics work for Theron, Kidman and John Lithgow as Roger Ailes, but Robbie's visual arc was made possible by Anne Morgan and Vivian Baker. Along with Collen Atwood's costumes, they illustrate how Kayla enters Fox News as a naïve woman, someone who does her face at home before going to work. Gradually, this gives way to the jewel-toned body-conscious dresses of the Fox News' on-air women and professionally done makeup and hair.
There's a downside to all of this technical perfection, however. Apart from Robbie, most of the cast is as helped by their transformation as they are impaired by it. The uncanniness of the whole thing tends to create a barrier between the actor and their audience, eliciting more awe in admiration of the makeup than a real engagement with the psychology of the people onscreen. Jay Roach's direction and Charles Randolph's myopic script don't make the situation any better, underlining the shallowness of the project.
In the end, Bombshell has very little to say about this universe of poisonous conservatism whose visuals it so perfectly recreates.
Reader Comments (15)
Meh.
It is gr8 work from the make up team,I thought Kidman was very strong in it but no one else seems to think so.
Imagine deciding to name a character "Kayla Pospisil." It sounds like a yeast infection remedy.
Jules: LOL. Thought the same thing. What a ridiculous name. Like literally, no one in the entire production process stopped to say, "Hey, that last name sounds a bit distracting and bizarre. How about Kayla Jenkins?"
I also would like to give Nicole some props for her underappreciated work.
And I also would like to give Theron some kudos for her generally besieged performance. She deserves her Oscar nomination. The makeup is a detriment, I agree, but I think she rises above it. Quite well.
I do not see any of the acting noteworthy. I did
think Robbie deserved the nom.
Weird turn into criticism of the movie at the end there, and I don't really agree with it at all. To me, the film is more about the mob mentality that Fox News promotes among its viewers and employees than about its politics, which I found just as chilling. I also find that saying it doesn't have enough to say about Fox's conservative politics to be another way of downplaying sexual harassment claims and the women who make them. I thought the film walked the balance of that pretty well, putting the sexual harassment in the spotlight and the politics in the background, where it belongs; the conservatism isn't the point, the sexual harassment is. Rather, the conservatism is the setting, and you can find it all over the mise-en-scene of the film.
This movie gets a lot of flack, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought all three leads were AWESOME.
I loved reading an interview with Alanna Ubach when she went into a Banana Republic to try to figure out what Jeanine Porto would wear on her day off.
Shmeebs--ITA!
Charlize Theron IS basically the only one challenging Renée Zellweger in Best Actress (think Johansson is a strong player, not everybody shares the same opinion though); Robbie deserved her nod but it's clearly Dern year. For Bombshell itself, we all know the story and what happened but it could've been written in a more interesting way to engage the viewers, thank God for its terrific casting, everyone is amazing.
The work on Theron has a strange effect, parallel to the uncanny valley. Like, it looks like Theron but then it doesn't and I can't quite put my finger on what it actually is that they did to make her look like Megyn Kelly because from certain angles it totally works and at others it looks just like Charlize. It's strange, but impressive.
I'd also shout out the work on actors playing the likes of Bill O'Reilly and the man with the moustache and the judge lady. They looked identical to their real-life counterparts.
Just saw this. It is quite stunning how they turned Theron into MKelly. It’s literally like seeing Megyn in the movie.
I thought Theron and Kidman really stood out for their performances and that the make up was awesome. I’d be happy to see this win - there was so much going on with every character. The scene where all the women are changing in the dressing room and they all have the same look was chilling.
It’s easy to write off this film for not being critical of Fox News, but I think the shots in this review (and many) are wrong. As viewers watching this film, we know what Fox News is and why it’s so toxic. Layering that on would have been too preachy. I like that this film considers things from these conservatives perspectives, slowly showing just how toxic it is by revealing the way people there draw lines around good and bad, how the mob takesover, and by what it means to know ones place in a hierarchy. I think it’s a damning look at Fox News by showing how much their corporate culture and impulses are driven by their view of the world. It also never truly makes Kelly sympathetic - we root for her to do the right thing without ever truly rooting for her.
Joe G, agreed. And the interview with Alanna Ubach (Jeanine Pirro ) is fascinating as she tries to understand why Pirro , likely ostracized much of her young life, found a father figure in Roger Ailes and was blindly loyal.
On a shallow note, the actress they cast as Kimberly Guilfoyle looks so much like her that I thought it was her when I first saw the preview.