How Mahershala Ali's True Detective "makeup engineer" turned him into an old man

Vulture

Mike Marino, the owner of makeup effects studio Prosthetic Renaissance, describes himself as a "makeup engineer." Marino said old man makeup is the most challenging to do, so he used The Nutty Professor and Amadeus for inspiration for True Detective Season 3. "A realistic makeup is the hardest thing to do in makeup, period,” he tells Vulture. “It is the pinnacle of skill. The pinnacle of believability. I can make an alien, and I can make it have 50 eyeballs or whatever. No one knows what it looks like. But an old person? Everybody knows what an old person looks like, so therefore you can’t get away with anything that looks fake or has technical problems.”