Tom Cruise Ages Up for Texas Oil Tycoon Role in 'Digger'

Tom Cruise plays a Texas oil tycoon in Digger, and the look took a lot of hands and a lot of silicone to build. Makeup artist Kazu Hiro was asked to transform Cruise for the part, and he has now described the job in detail to Variety.

The film is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It also stars Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and Sandra Hüller. The story follows a character named Digger, whose company sets off a potential global catastrophe.

Digger is an older man, with jowls, thinning hair, a rumpled appearance and a belly. Hiro confirmed that Cruise wore a prosthetic belly for the role. The character was first imagined as around 76 years old. That was later revised to 67.

The process started in London. Hiro met Cruise there for a 3D scan, lifecasts and photographs, which gave his team the shapes they needed before they sculpted the pieces. The final design was full coverage, made up of 12 separate prosthetic parts.

Application took time at the start. Hiro said the test makeup took less than five hours. On the second day, the process was cut to two and a half hours.

Cruise has spoken about the time pressure too. In September, he told The Hollywood Reporter that the transformation had originally taken six hours in makeup. He said he had the hair and makeup teams work to shorten that.

For anyone who has sat in a makeup chair, the numbers tell the story. A face built from a dozen pieces, glued on each morning, eats a day. Cutting it to a few hours is the kind of change that keeps a shoot moving, and it is the kind of detail that rarely reaches a cinema screen. Viewers will see the finished man on screen, not the hours behind him.

Hiro's recent work includes transforming Dwayne Johnson for The Smashing Machine. Digger adds another project to a run of films in which the makeup team's work is as much a part of the performance as the acting.

Further details of the film's production are expected to follow as it moves toward release.