The year after Emma Stone won her Best Actress Academy Award for singing and dancing in La La Land, she took to the court for a sports-focused biopic. To play tennis legend Billie Jean King, Stone not only dyed her signature red hair brown and underwent a subtle but significant makeup process, she also put on 15 pounds of muscle in training for Battle of the Sexes. RELATED: 17 Actors Who Played the Same Character Years Later. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar in 2002 for starring in this feature adaptation of a novel by the same name. The actor disappeared into her role as the troubled author of Mrs. Dalloway, famously donning a prosthetic nose to look more like her. The year after Kidman took home her Academy Award, Charlize Theron won for starring in a biopic of an infamous serial killer. It wasn’t just the physical transformation (which include a significant amount of makeup and prosthetic teeth) that wowed critics. Theron’s turn as Aileen Wuornos remains one of the most acclaimed film performances ever. Then in 2019, Theron disappeared into the role of anchor Megyn Kelly in Bombshell, the chronicle of the Fox News misconduct scandal. HuffPost reports that the movie’s Oscar-winning makeup artist, Kazu Hiro, “took a head cast and 3D scan of Theron, then studied images and film of both Kelly and Theron to learn their key features and differences, mapping out exactly which prosthetics he and his team would have to use and how they would have to use them.” Intricate stuff. Coming out of Saturday Night Live, Eddie Murphy was already a known chameleon. (And has famously acted opposite many versions of himself since.) But one set of transformations stands out. Murphy plays three other characters in the 1988 comedy Coming to America aside from the lead, Prince Akeem. With the help of some serious hair and makeup magic, he also plays a soul singer, a barbershop owner, and a Jewish grandpa. After playing Michael Scott on The Office for years, viewers thought they had Steve Carell pegged. But his dramatic turn in a shocking real-life story changed that. The comedian donned a prosthetic nose and other makeup to play John du Pont, the eccentric millionaire with a deadly obsession with wrestling in 2014’s Foxcatcher. Rooney Mara was still an up-and-coming actor when she was cast in the 2011 American adaptation of this bestselling Swedish thriller series. To transform into the hacker vigilante, Mara shaved her head, bleached her eyebrows, and got several real body piercings. After playing Queen Elizabeth II for two seasons, The Crown star Claire Foy was no stranger to altering her appearance for a role. And she did so again for the same reason as Mara. Foy took over the role (and the tattoos) of Salander for the most recent movie in the series, The Girl in the Spider’s Web. RELATED: Mark Wahlberg Looks Unrecognizable After Shaving His Head. Oscar Isaac didn’t have to do much more than slip into a flight suit to play his Star Wars character, Poe Dameron. But antagonizing the X-Men was a different story. Isaac was hidden under putty and painted blue for his X-Men: Apocalypse villain. And it wasn’t particularly worth it. Neither critics nor fans had many good things to say about this chapter of the franchise. The model and actor doesn’t look anything like herself in these superhero flicks. Romijn endured nine hours of makeup daily to become the shape-shifting mutant Mystique in X-Men (2000), X2: X-Men United (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). When Jennifer Lawrence took over the role in the new X-films, she managed to talk producers into letting her wear a suit instead of pounds of blue body goop by the time the first sequel rolled around. And for more fun Hollywood content delivered right to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. In one of his final roles, the late Heath Ledger gave a performance that earned him a posthumous Academy Award. With prosthetics to give him the Batman villain’s scarred smile, plus some freaky, caked-on circus makeup and an acid-green dye job, Ledger fully inhabited the Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight. Another performer known for being fearless in a makeup chair, Tilda Swinton is unrecognizable on screen more often than not. We could have just as easily picked her snaggle-toothed Minister Mason in Snowpiercer or her albino undertaker in The Dead Don’t Die. But in Suspiria, the 2018 remake of the classic Italian horror film, Swinton plays Madame Blanc, the choreographer of a spooky dance academy; Dr. Klemperer, an elderly, male psychologist; and… well, we won’t spoil the last one for you if you haven’t seen it yet. Fun fact: In the credits, Klemperer is credited to a fictional actor named “Lutz Ebersdorf.” Before donning the Batsuit for Tim Burton’s 1989 film, Michael Keaton collaborated with the director on another project, playing a much more ebullient character. In an interview with Yahoo on the 1988 movie’s 30th anniversary, makeup artist Ve Neill revealed that turning Keaton into the ghost with the most involved putting moss in his hair and fashioning fake lips into a broken nose. “Michael said, ‘You know, I really would like to not totally look like myself, three-dimensionally,’” Neill recalled. And that, they certainly achieved. Another actor on this list who took an Oscar home for her troubles, Marion Cotillard won the award in 2008. To play the legendary and distinctive-looking French singer, Cotillard shaved off her eyebrows, shaved back her hairline, and sat through five hours of makeup before filming.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb Like Theron and Swinton, Margot Robbie is proving herself to be a chameleon in more ways than one. As the queen grows older in the film, Robbie fades further and further away. In addition to ghostly white face makeup and a bright red wig, the actor also had to wear many prosthetic scars on her face to represent the marks left by a bout with smallpox. This film about disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding wasn’t a big-budget affair. Without a ton of time to waste, makeup artist Deborah La Mia Denaver utilized little tricks like manipulating Robbie’s eyelids with eyelash glue to make her look more like the real deal. The chiseled face of the Swedish actor (brother to Alexander and son of Stellan) proved to be the perfect canvas for a nightmare that only Stephen King could dream up. In 2017’s It and 2018’s It Chapter Two, Bill Skarsgård plays a malevolent entity that terrorizes a town over centuries in the form of a creepy clown with razor-sharp teeth. He told GQ that the process of becoming Pennywise took two-and-a-half hours, but also that he won the role in part because he can twist his face into some evil smiles all on his own. Luther star Idris Elba also rocks some significant hair and makeup work as his Thor character, Heimdall, but at least you can tell that it’s him. Be honest—you would never have know that the Star Trek Beyond villain was Stringer Bell from The Wire unless the credits told you. According to makeup artist Joel Harlow’s comments to Inverse, Krall’s look was inspired in part by sea life and lizards, though he also has “a little bit of Klingon” in him. Cate Blanchett is fond of the occasional low-key cameo (see: her hidden completely by a hazmat suit in Hot Fuzz), but this transformation takes the cake. Blanchett joined five other actors in playing Bob Dylan in 2007’s I’m Not There, and was the only woman to embody the musician. After the Irish actor was announced, fans started to expect a visual take on this comic book character that would be a far cry from the norm. But the first teaser for The Batman dispelled all that. In fact, it’s kind of a process of elimination to even figure our where Farrell is in the trailer. Details have yet to come out about how he’s been transformed into the Penguin, but in this getup, we definitely wouldn’t recognize him walking down the street.
