He’s two-faced.
In Hulu’s “Chad Powers,” Glen Powell’s disgraced football player character, Russ Holliday, dons an elaborate disguise to try to give himself a second chance at college football glory.
After publicly embarrassing himself and squashing his future prospects, Russ assumes the identity of “Chad Powers,” puts on prosthetic nose and a wig, and uses that get-up to try to fool people into thinking he’s a new player for a Georgia college team.
“We have it down to about an hour with [Powell] for his makeup,” Alexei Dmitriew, the show’s makeup department head, exclusively told The Post. The “Twisters” actor, 37, would then assemble his wig.
“[It’s] about an hour or an hour and a half process,” Dmitriew noted. “It’s not too bad at all.”
The show is based on a viral sketch that Eli Manning did on his ESPN series (both Eli and Peyton Manning are exec producers via their company Omaha Productions).
Vincent Van Dyke, the show’s special makeup effects designer, told The Post that they took 3D scans of Powell’ s head, and used that to make clay model heads.
“We’re literally taking oil based clay, and we’re sculpting these different looks on these faces of Glen. A lot of different looks were rejected,” he revealed. “It becomes a little bit of a Mr. Potato Head, where we’ve got a plethora of prosthetic pieces, and a few different hair options.”
Van Dyke admits that the team “certainly” was concerned about making the “Chad” character resemble Powell too much.
“Especially with an A-list actor that’s as recognizable as Glen Powell, we’re trying to find something that feels like you’re not burying him so completely that you lose him, but then at the same time, be plausible that people [in the show] don’t recognize it,” he explained.
That mindset was “taken into consideration” — and Powell was involved in the process.
As Van Dyke and his team were creating Chad’s appearance, Powell was, “looking at something and going, ‘yeah, I love these teeth.’ Like, ‘this is helping me get into character and figure out the voices.’”
For instance, in one of their discarded aesthetics, the Chad Powers character had “little baby teeth,” he said. But it was “too gummy” and distracting, so they nixed that.
Powell was “really open” to trying different options to land on what worked for the comedy.
The prosthetics used to create Chad included a forehead, two cheeks, a nose, and an upper lip – along with lace eyebrows, a lace mustache, and the wig.
“Every day that [Powell] works, we use a whole new set of prosthetics,” Van Dyke said.
“We might have gone through 50, 52 days, 56 days, maybe. Maybe something like 56 prosthetics.”
And since that included five pieces for his face, over the course of the shoot they went through roughly 250 prosthetics “when you add up all the individual pieces.”
“People don’t realize this, but when you’re doing a prosthetic makeup show like this, every set is destroyed at the end of the day,” he told The Post. So, when you glue down a prosthetic piece and you blend those edges …..and you go to remove that piece, it is just shot. It goes right in the trash. So every single time a character works, it’s a new set of those prosthetic pieces, which is a lot!”
Certain pieces like the wig were reused, however.
“We have different versions of wigs that go underneath helmets, because they get squished in and stuff like that,” Van Dyke noted of the football prop.
Prosthetics are also heavily involved in the show’s plot, as “Chad Powers” has several gags related to Russ’s disguise.
For instance, in one incident, his face is leaking water, much to the confusion of everyone around him.
In another scene, a bug gets trapped behind his prosthetic cheek.
“When he had the water coming out, we made bladders to go underneath the prosthetics,” Van Dyke said.
“We were behind them with a water pump, pumping water.”
Since “Chad Powers” uses prosthetics snafus as plot points on the show, are they really possible?
“Probably not the bug, because it’s glued to its face,” said Dmitriew. “So if there’s a bug underneath his prosthetics, something is going really wrong.”
“Sometimes you do maybe get little sweat bubbles, but not to the extent of what we had [onscreen], where it was pouring down his face to make him look like he was crying. That was a little exaggerated.”
Van Dyke said that the show took some “liberties” in showing disasters that can happen when wearing prosthetics. “But what I think was great is that there were a lot of times that I would jump on Zooms to consult with the writers,” he said.
The writers would ask him if certain situations were possible or too far-fetched, which Van Dyke appreciated.
“I love the fact that they were involving us, and understanding that they’re not trying to push it so far that people in our business would be watching the show going, ‘well, that would never f–king happen,’” he told The Post. “It was nice that we could weigh in on that. I think we took things that were plausible and then just really expounded upon them, as much as we possibly could.”
“Chad Powers” airs on Hulu weekly on Tuesdays. The Season 1 finale drops Oct. 28.
