Everything you Wanted to know, but were afraid to ask about makeup in the Harry Potter films

Have you ever thought about the scale of the makeup artists' work when creating a series of Harry Potter films? But impressive work has been done on this front. The main make-up artist of the films told some secrets and interesting facts that will allow you to look at long-familiar works in a new way.

(22 photos in total)

Source: Buzzfeed

Meet Marc Coulier (right). He is a professional makeup artist, winner of two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs and many honorary titles. He worked on the makeup for all eight Harry Potter films.

The underwater scenes from the series "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" were really exciting, as was the makeup for them. It took about an hour and a half to fix the gills that grew out of Harry Potter after he ate the gills. The gills were made of silicone.

"Scuba diving (Daniel Radcliffe) in a real pond for just one scene was incredible. There were about 20 divers under the water. One was removing bubbles from his hair and from his face… You won't believe how difficult it was to shoot one scene." The insides of the gills were made of pieces of silk, so they moved beautifully in the water. "We've done a lot of testing with both Dan and his understudy," says the makeup artist.

But working with Daniel Radcliffe was a lot of fun. "Dan Radcliffe is a great joker, it was a lot of fun with him. When we started filming, he was still a kid, he was 11 or so, and he grew up among us. When we finished, he was 16 or 17 years old. We always laughed at him, told jokes."

Rafe Fiennes was given Voldemort makeup 60-70 times during the entire filming.

Of these, 40-50 times fell on the last two films.

Three people applied makeup to him for two hours each time, and it's considered fast. "This was the time limit for Rafe's makeup: we could spend no more than two hours, so three people worked on it."

Voldemort's makeup included eyebrow stickers, "a little intricate masking from head to toe," darkening of the eyes, a lot of venous traces, that is, temporary tattoos, as well as false teeth and nails. "We wanted him to look very much like a snake."

His famous creepy nose is special effects. The filmmakers couldn't decide for a long time whether to leave him with or without a nose. "There was a lot of debate about whether they want to take their nose off, or leave. It took quite a long time to figure it out."

This is partly because they wanted to use the actor's real face as much as possible, so he remained recognizable. "When such money is paid to a famous actor, it is unlikely that he needs to be made up beyond recognition. And Rafe has such a bright appearance that we wanted to use it without abusing makeup."

And Fiennes really liked the makeup. "He loved watching the kids on set, and if he managed to make them cry, he would look at me and grin. He's wonderful."

About 20 people worked on Aunt Marge's inflatable costume for the movie "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" for four months.

And most of this scene is real shooting, there are few special effects. "Special effects are used to fly and remove the cable from the frame. She was lifted into the air on a large installation with cables, it was really difficult. But most of it is real."

The costume required three stages of plastic makeup, pumps, gas separators and large inflatable chambers.

"We made a camera for the face, which we molded so that it looked like her face, inserted over an inflatable balloon on her face and inflated. That's when you see how it starts to inflate. We did the second stage, where we molded the inflated part and inflated it even more again. Then we did the third stage, where it is already completely inflated."

The corpse of Aragog was made by 15 to 20 people for six months.

It weighed about a ton and was the size of a small car, so it took a crane to get it to the set.

Although he didn't move during the funeral scene, the spider had to be solid, because the filmmakers wanted to change his position during filming. So technically he could move.

Kieran Hinds, who played Aberforth Dumbledore, was heavily made up to be more like Michael Gambon, who played his brother, Albus Dumbledore.

After several preliminary designs, Coulier molded Gambon's nose, a whole frontal part and exact false copies of bags under his eyes, like Gambon's, in order to make up Hynds.

Coulier really wanted to replicate Gambon's eyebrows exactly. He used the frontal part to push Hynds' eyebrows up, and pinned each eyebrow hair onto an element of makeup. He copied every hair of Gambon's eyebrows as accurately as possible.

"Michael Gambon has pretty high eyebrows. This is a very expressive trait, and they are long, gray and bushy, Kieran Hinds' eyebrows are not like that at all… It turned out pretty well. We wanted them to look not exactly like brothers, but like brothers."

Coulier initially made several false noses for Alan Rickman as Professor Snape, but in the end they decided not to use them. "They decided that he would be in all the films, and they didn't want him to suffer from wearing plastic makeup all the time. Alan was a wonderful person."

It was great working with Gambon. Sometimes he came back from lunch, scattering crumbs from chips on his artificial beard. Nevertheless, it is still unclear which of the team of filmmakers decided to collect his beard in a ponytail.