How Weta Built Alexander Skarsgård's Wicker Husband Without a Single Splinter

Alexander Skarsgård's wicker husband in "Wicker," now in theaters, is made of 50 individual 3D-printed appliances painted to look like wicker and stitched onto a soft spandex suit — which is why Olivia Colman never got splinters during the film's intimate scenes. No actual straw touched either actor.

The film, directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson from Ursula Wills' short story "The Wicker Husband," stars Colman as a spinster fisherwoman in a medieval community where marriage gives a woman her worth. The village mocks her as she makes her living independently. She asks the local basket weaver, played by Peter Dinklage, to make her a wicker husband. Enter Skarsgård — under extensive practical prosthetics — as the basket man.

The directors set the mandate from the start. "We want to make this practically," they told Weta Workshop's prosthetic makeup designer Joe Dunckley and lead makeup FX artist Sarah Rubano. "They wanted a piece of beautiful concept art that showed their vision," Dunckley said.

How do you build a believable wicker man?

The pair spent 18 months in research and development alone. The core problem was material: prosthetic makeup products are manufactured to imitate human flesh and skin, and Skarsgård's character is woven plant matter. "This guy is made of wicker, so we had to do it a different way," Dunckley said.

The theory they tested, in Dunckley's words: "We thought that if we could get the strands of the weave to be individual and get them to move as if they were individual muscle fibers that drove his movement, then he could be a believable sentient wicker being."

They could not mold it. That failure pushed them toward 3D digital sculpting and 3D printing, beginning with a full-body scan of Skarsgård so every piece could be sculpted specific to him.

The intricate weave came from a relatively new powder-bed laser-sintered printing process. "It's a volume of thermoplastic elastomer; you shoot a laser into it and where that focal point of the laser is, it fuses the powder and you can build intricate weave and complex geometry," Dunckley explained. "The powder in the bed holds the strands apart while they set."

The result feels close to the real thing. "It's a semiflexible material, not too dissimilar to the feeling of touching proper wicker weave," Dunckley said.

What went on Skarsgård's face?

Rubano's makeup comprised 10 individual prosthetic pieces. The routine moved between the makeup chair and the suit, depending on the stage of the transformation. "We had ears, eye bags and lips. We had an underlip piece and a jaw piece, and the larger forehead, nose, cheekbones and there was lots of hand painting around his eyes," Rubano said.

His beard, hair and eyelashes came from muka, a silky-soft fiber extracted from the harakeke plant. The material let the team knot individual strands directly onto the weave, so they could cut and style it like human hair.

The risk with a full transformation is losing the actor beneath it. Dunckley's team used 3D animation software to prevent that. "We could track the expressive range of the face so that we could engineer into the weave the ability to move for his expression," he said.

By the end of production, the full transformation took 90 minutes. "He would get into this very fitted suit and we would bounce between the makeup chair and getting him ready in the suit," Rubano said of the workflow.

Dunckley credits the actor himself. "What a wonderful collaborator and team player! He was resilient. He was funny. He was so invested. He would sit as still as a statue in the chair."

One problem persisted: heat. "He runs hot; the suit's kind of hot and it was a hot Hungarian spring," Rubano revealed.

What about the wicker penis?

Audiences have speculated about the mechanics and "the potential danger of a wicker penis," as Dunckley put it. His answer is character logic: "I think the basket maker, he's skilled. He's traveled the world. He's learned from every culture how to weave, and I think he would know exactly how to weave a wicker ween so it's user-friendly."

The actual fabrication fell to the film's costume designers, András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász, and it was a rush job. "They fabricated the wicker ween for the full-body river shot. They did such a great job because it was very last minute, but it's puff spandex. The weave was 3D, so there was dimension to it. From a distance, they color-matched it so beautifully," Rubano said.

What does this change for practical effects? A process built because molding failed — laser sintering, full-body scanning, digitally tracked facial expression — is now a proven route for full-body character work, and one a star actor sat through 90 times in a hot Hungarian spring without complaint. Whether other productions commit to an 18-month development window is the open question.