Makeup Oscar Legend on Grinch, Thriller & King Kong

Makeup artist Rick Baker, the most decorated artist in Oscar history with seven Academy Awards for makeup and prosthetics, is opening up about his most legendary transformations - including the time he turned Jim Carrey into the Grinch, gave Michael Jackson his iconic “Thriller” look, and even suited up as King Kong himself.

In a wide-ranging retrospective, Baker recalled the grueling, painstaking process behind some of cinema’s most unforgettable characters, offering a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into a career that reshaped what was possible in practical effects.

For Ron Howard’s 2000 live-action adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Baker faced one of his most physically demanding challenges: making Jim Carrey disappear under layers of green fur and latex. The process was notoriously intense, requiring upwards of three hours in the makeup chair each day before Carrey could even step onto the set. The actor, known for his manic energy, reportedly found the transformation both liberating and exhausting, and Baker has said the key was building the suit in pieces that allowed Carrey to move - and improvise - as freely as possible.

“Jim was a force of nature,” Baker said. “You couldn’t just put a mask on him and expect him to perform. The whole design had to work with his face, his expressions, everything. It was like building a performance tool, not just a costume.”

The result, a towering, emerald-skinned creature with a rubbery, expressive face, earned Baker his sixth Oscar - a record at the time - and cemented Carrey’s Grinch as a holiday classic. But the challenge went beyond the suit itself; Baker and his team had to maintain the elaborate look across months of filming, with constant touch-ups between takes.

Long before the Grinch, Baker had already made history with Michael Jackson’s 1983 music video for “Thriller.” The brief was deceptively simple: turn the world’s biggest pop star into a werewolf on camera. But Baker, then a rising star in effects, had to figure out how to do it in real time, with no cuts hidden and no post-production trickery. The now-famous sequence shows Jackson’s face elongating, his ears growing, and his eyes turning yellow - all happening in one continuous shot.

Baker had engineered the prosthetic transformations to work mechanically, with a series of pieces moved by cables and rods hidden beneath the actor’s hair and makeup. The result was a groundbreaking visual that terrified and delighted audiences in equal measure. Jackson, according to Baker, was thrilled with the result, though the process was painstaking; every take required the full prosthetic rig to be reset from scratch.

But perhaps no project better showcased Baker’s range than his work on the 1976 remake of King Kong, where he didn’t just create the giant ape - he played him. In an era before motion capture and digital effects, Baker spent hours inside a massive, detailed gorilla suit that he had designed himself. The suit was so realistic - complete with animatronic facial muscles and a hydraulic head - that director John Guillermin insisted Baker wear it for nearly every shot, often in sweltering conditions.

Baker has described the experience as both exhilarating and punishing. The suit was so heavy that he could only work in short bursts, and cooling tubes had to be fed through the costume to prevent heat exhaustion. Yet the performance he delivered, full of quiet, heartbreaking moments of recognition and grief, remains a benchmark for practical creature acting. “I wasn’t just wearing a suit,” Baker said. “I was trying to play a character that the audience could feel for. King Kong wasn’t a monster. He was the most human thing in the film.”

Looking back, Baker says the industry has changed dramatically since his early days, when practical effects were the only option and the craft was learned through trial and error. Digital effects have since taken over many of the tasks Baker once handled by hand, but he’s unworried about being replaced.

“Digital is a different tool, not a better one,” he said. “There are things it can do that we could never do practically. But there’s also something irreplaceable about seeing a real actor in a real suit, with real sweat and real weight. Audiences can feel that, even if they can’t say why.”

Baker’s record of seven Oscar wins in the makeup category - starting with An American Werewolf in London in 1981 and spanning through his work on Men in Black and How the Grinch Stole Christmas - remains unmatched. He retired from film work in 2015, but his legacy lives on in every creature feature, every horror villain, and every moment when an actor disappears completely into a character.

Fans of practical effects can rediscover Baker’s work on streaming platforms and home video, where the Grinch’s expressive face and Kong’s soulful eyes still hold up decades after they first hit the screen. For Baker, though, the memories are less about the accolades and more about the challenges.

“Every one of those jobs was a puzzle,” he said. “And I got to solve some pretty amazing puzzles.”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter