On May 4, 2026, Bad Bunny walked the Met Gala red carpet looking 53 years older than he actually is. Sagging jowls, sunspots, deep-set wrinkles, graying hair. The 32-year-old reggaeton star had been aged into an 85-year-old man so convincingly that half of Twitter thought it was CGI. It wasn’t. Three hours of handcrafted silicone prosthetics, sculpted and applied by Mike Marino, working out of a studio in New Jersey.
That same night, Heidi Klum showed up as a marble statue. Not a costume that looked like marble. An actual full-body prosthetic suit cast from foam latex, painted to replicate stone, engineered to move like skin. Same guy.
Mike Marino is the three-time Oscar-nominated prosthetic makeup artist and founder of Prosthetic Renaissance, the studio behind some of the most talked-about physical transformations in film, television, and live events over the past 25 years. He turned Colin Farrell into the Penguin. He aged Eddie Murphy into six different characters for Coming 2 America. He gave Sebastian Stan a disfigured face for A Different Man. And he’s been building Heidi Klum’s Halloween costumes for over a decade.
He’s not a celebrity. He doesn’t have a million followers. But when Hollywood or the Met Gala needs someone to make a human being look like something they’re not, Marino is the call.
Last updated: May 2026
Quick answers
Who is Mike Marino the prosthetic artist?
Mike Marino is a three-time Oscar-nominated prosthetic makeup designer and founder of Prosthetic Renaissance, a studio based in New York and New Jersey. He’s known for creating Colin Farrell’s Penguin transformation, Bad Bunny’s aged Met Gala 2026 look, and over a decade of Heidi Klum’s Halloween costumes. He apprenticed under legendary makeup artist Dick Smith and has worked on over 100 film and television projects.
Did Mike Marino do Bad Bunny’s Met Gala look?
Yes. Marino and his team at Prosthetic Renaissance created Bad Bunny’s old-man transformation for the 2026 Met Gala. The process involved six weeks of preparation including laser scans, 3D printing, and clay sculpting, followed by a three-hour application on the night of the event. The look aged Bad Bunny from 32 to 85 with handcrafted silicone prosthetics covering his face, neck, and hands.
How Mike Marino went from teenage apprentice to Hollywood’s go-to prosthetic artist
Marino didn’t go to film school to learn prosthetics. He went to Dick Smith’s house.
Smith, who died in 2014, was the godfather of modern prosthetic makeup. He created Linda Blair’s possessed face in The Exorcist, aged Marlon Brando for The Godfather, and trained a generation of makeup artists who would go on to define the field: Rick Baker, Stan Winston, Greg Cannom. Marino became Smith’s protege as a teenager, learning the fundamentals of lifecasting, sculpting, and silicone application directly from the man who invented most of those techniques for film.
That apprenticeship gave Marino something most makeup artists spend decades trying to earn: credibility with directors who care about craft. Martin Scorsese hired him. So did Darren Aronofsky. Jim Jarmusch brought him on for The Dead Don’t Die in 2019. By the time Matt Reeves needed someone to turn Colin Farrell into Oswald Cobblepot for The Batman in 2022, Marino already had decades of work behind him.
But the thing that separates Marino from other working makeup artists isn’t just his resume. It’s that he built a company around the work.
What is Prosthetic Renaissance?
Prosthetic Renaissance is Marino’s studio, operating out of New York and New Jersey. He founded it to do something specific: keep the handmade, practical-effects tradition alive in an industry that was rapidly shifting toward CGI and digital effects.
The name isn’t accidental. Marino named the studio after the artists and techniques he learned from Smith, Baker, and Winston. The studio handles everything in-house: lifecasting, digital sculpting, 3D printing, silicone casting, foam latex fabrication, and final application. That vertical integration is part of how Marino maintains quality control on projects that can involve 30+ artists working simultaneously.
Prosthetic Renaissance has worked with clients across film, television, music, fashion, and live events. The studio’s roster includes directors like Scorsese and Aronofsky, musicians like Bad Bunny and The Weeknd (Marino designed the prosthetic face for the Dawn FM album cover), and fashion clients like the Met Gala. Heidi Klum alone has been a recurring client for over a decade.
The business model is project-based and high-touch. Each transformation is custom: no two projects use the same molds, the same materials mix, or the same application process. A Met Gala-grade transformation like Bad Bunny’s requires six weeks of prep, a team of specialists, and materials that include medical-grade silicone, foam latex, and custom pigments. It’s not scalable in the traditional startup sense. But that’s the point. The value is in the craft.
How did Mike Marino turn Colin Farrell into the Penguin?
The Penguin transformation is probably Marino’s most commercially visible work. Colin Farrell spent three hours in the makeup chair every shooting day, with eight to nine individual silicone prosthetic pieces glued to his face, neck, and body. Marino’s team applied each piece, then hand-painted every scar, freckle, and skin texture detail.
Farrell has said publicly that the first time he looked in the mirror during the makeup test, he immediately knew who the character was. He knew how to speak, how to walk, how to hold himself. The prosthetics didn’t just change how Farrell looked. They changed how he performed.
The work earned Marino an Emmy Award at the 2025 Creative Arts Emmys, where The Penguin took home eight technical awards total. It was Marino’s second major awards-circuit run after his Oscar nomination for The Batman in 2022, which featured the same Penguin design in a smaller role.
Matt Reeves reportedly confirmed that Marino will return as prosthetic makeup designer for The Batman: Part 2, which speaks to a pattern in Marino’s career: directors don’t just hire him once. They keep coming back.
What are Mike Marino’s Oscar nominations for?
Marino has three Academy Award nominations in Best Makeup and Hairstyling, spanning three very different projects:
Coming 2 America (2021): The sequel required Marino to recreate the aging prosthetics Eddie Murphy originally wore in the 1988 film, plus design new characters. Murphy played multiple roles, each requiring distinct prosthetic builds. The nomination, shared with Mike Fontaine, was Marino’s first.
The Batman (2022): Colin Farrell’s Penguin transformation earned the second nomination. The design was so effective that audiences didn’t recognize Farrell in the role, and the character was spun off into his own HBO series.
A Different Man (2025): Director Aaron Schimberg’s film starred Sebastian Stan as a man with severe facial disfigurement. Marino created a three-piece silicone prosthetic for Stan’s character, designed to look like neurofibromatosis, with actor Adam Pearson (who has the condition) serving as a reference. The film was shot in 22 days on a fraction of the budget of Marino’s previous nominated projects. Stan thanked Marino by name when he won the Golden Globe for the role.
Who does Heidi Klum’s Halloween costumes?
Mike Marino has been Heidi Klum’s prosthetic collaborator for Halloween since the early 2010s. The partnership has produced some of the most viral costume reveals on the internet, each one more technically ambitious than the last.
The greatest hits: Klum as an elderly version of herself in 2013. As Jessica Rabbit in 2015. As the wolf from Michael Jackson’s Thriller in 2017. As Princess Fiona from Shrek in 2018. As E.T. in 2024. As Medusa in 2025, a five-month project that featured moving animatronic snakes and full reptilian prosthetics.
Then came the 2026 Met Gala, where Klum appeared as a living marble statue. Inspired by Giuseppe Sammartino’s Veiled Christ and Raffaele Monti’s Veiled Vestal, the look required a full-body 3D scan, custom sculpting of every fabric fold in the “stone,” and a suit cast from ultra-soft foam latex that allowed Klum to move naturally while looking like carved marble. Marino told Variety it was “one of the hardest designs we’ve ever created.”
The Klum partnership is a case study in what repeat clients mean for a niche creative business. Each project builds on the last, pushing the studio’s technical capabilities forward while generating the kind of viral visibility that money can’t buy. Klum’s 2026 Met Gala look pulled 4,400+ upvotes on Reddit’s fashion communities and coverage from Variety, ABC News, Hollywood Reporter, and Cosmopolitan.
Why practical prosthetics are winning over CGI right now
There’s an irony in Marino’s timing. In an era where AI-generated faces and deepfake technology can age or transform anyone digitally in post-production, the demand for handmade prosthetics is rising, not falling.
Part of it is audience fatigue. Viewers can tell when something looks “off” in CGI, especially with facial transformations. The uncanny valley hasn’t been solved. Practical prosthetics avoid it entirely because the face on screen is a real physical object interacting with real light.
Part of it is the actor effect. Farrell’s Penguin performance was shaped by the physical weight and restriction of Marino’s prosthetics. Stan’s A Different Man performance was informed by feeling the silicone on his face. Directors like Reeves and Schimberg choose practical effects specifically because they give actors something real to react to.
And part of it is cultural. The 2026 Met Gala‘s theme was “Fashion Is Art,” and the most talked-about looks weren’t digitally enhanced Instagram posts. They were physical, handcrafted transformations that existed in real space. Bad Bunny’s aged face. Klum’s marble body. Both made by a guy with silicone and paintbrushes, not a rendering farm.
Marino himself has spoken about this directly. In a 2025 interview about A Different Man, he referenced “the soul in handmade work that AI could never replicate.” It’s a position that resonates in an industry increasingly anxious about AI replacement.
How much do Mike Marino’s prosthetics cost?
Marino doesn’t publicly list prices, and custom prosthetic work varies enormously based on complexity, timeline, and team size. But the economics of high-end prosthetic makeup give some indication of the scale.
A Met Gala-grade transformation like Bad Bunny’s requires six weeks of preparation, a team of specialists, medical-grade silicone and foam latex, 3D scanning and printing equipment, and three hours of application time. The Klum Met Gala statue involved a full-body 3D scan, months of sculpting, and custom foam latex casting. Her 2025 Medusa costume took five months and a team of 30 artists.
Industry estimates for high-end prosthetic transformations of this caliber range from $10,000 to $50,000+ per project, depending on scope. Film and television budgets are separate: The Penguin’s prosthetic budget covered daily three-hour applications across an entire production schedule, which adds up to hundreds of hours of labor.
For Marino, the business isn’t about volume. Prosthetic Renaissance doesn’t run an assembly line. Each project is a custom commission, priced on complexity, and the studio’s reputation lets it command rates at the top of the market. It’s a different business model than the tech-enabled ventures flooding the startup world, but in a niche where reputation is everything, it works.
What’s next for Mike Marino and Prosthetic Renaissance
Marino is confirmed to return as prosthetic makeup designer for The Batman: Part 2, which means another round of the Penguin transformation for Colin Farrell on a blockbuster production schedule. Beyond that, the studio’s trajectory suggests more crossover between film, fashion, and live events.
The Met Gala work opened a new lane. Prosthetic Renaissance was already known in Hollywood, but the viral visibility of the Bad Bunny and Klum transformations introduced Marino to an audience that doesn’t follow film credits. Reddit threads about his work pulled thousands of upvotes. Met Gala coverage named him specifically, which is rare for a behind-the-scenes craftsperson.
The practical-effects revival shows no signs of slowing. As AI-generated imagery becomes more common in advertising and social media, the premium on things that are physically real and handcrafted is going up, not down. That dynamic mirrors what’s happening across industries where companies are pulling back from AI and finding that human craft still commands a premium. Marino built his studio on the bet that craft would outlast technology. Twenty-five years in, that bet is paying off.
