No trees were harmed in the making of this man.
Just over a week before Wicker began filming in Hungary, costume designers András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász, who work together as András + Attila, were thrown one big curveball. Alexander Skarsgård, who plays—as the title suggests—a man made entirely out of wicker, was only supposed to show skin from the waist up.
“The directors [Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson] came up with this idea nine days before we started to shoot that they would like to see Alex completely naked,” Tóth says. The duo and their team of costumers got to work fashioning Skarsgård a bottom half—wood and all. “We had nine days to catch up with Wētā Workshop [who created the prosthetic top half] and to finish the whole costume,” Tóth adds.
But there was an additional challenge in store: the wicker suit also had to withstand water. The team fashioned the bottoms out of scuba material that would allow Skarsgård to submerge in the water. Godena-Juhász and Tóth took a mannequin made to the actor’s measurements and began plotting a pattern. “This is a very traditional old couture technique: you have a body, you cover it with paper tape, and then you cut it,” Tóth explains. “So from a three-dimensional body, you made a two-dimensional pattern.” But the material was all white. “We had to paint with a tiny brush, every single printed detail and shade it,” Tóth adds. In the final step, the duo treated the paint with heat, giving it a three-dimensional effect that matched Skarsgård’s prosthetic top.
