In a story about transformation, the engineers of change can be many. Take “Emilia Pérez,” the award-winning musical film about a Mexican drug lord, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, who hires a lawyer to help facilitate not just a disappearance but also gender-affirming surgery that will transform the brutish cartel leader into an elegant socialite, Emilia Pérez.
The transformation from Manitas to Emilia is the dramatic center of the film and the product of a collaboration that included Boris Razon, writer of the 2018 novel “Écoute,” on which the film is loosely based; screenwriter and director Jacques Audiard; actress Karla Sofía Gascón; and the below-the-line talent responsible for the look of both Manitas and Emilia, particularly costume designer Virginie Montel and makeup department head Julia Floch-Carbonel.
“They allowed me to go deeper into the character and make it feel real,” Gascón said of Montel and Floch-Carbonel. “If the makeup and prosthetics felt very fake and unreal, it would be a lot harder to get into the role. The part that every different department in filmmaking plays is extremely important to create a piece of art that’s full of passion.
“That’s what cinema is: It can take stories and make them believable for the audience. And for me, as an actress, it’s got to be believable. I think the distinction here is that it did not feel like a disguise that I was wearing. I was truly embodying the character because Julia and Virginie created that magic to make it feel real.”
Initially, “Emilia Pérez” wasn’t even supposed to be a movie; Audiard wrote it as an opera libretto, only gradually coming around to the idea that the material was better suited to a film that would be dramatically different from the director’s past work, which included “A Prophet,” “Dheepan” and “Rust and Bone.” “We had been looking at a lot of reference photography from Mexico and other places, thinking about the influences we wanted to have as we started building the world,” said Montel, who was involved from the earliest stages. “But when Jacques decided it would be a musical, it all changed. He asked us to imagine how it could be because reality was too flat for the story.”
When they began casting, Audiard figured that the character of Manitas/Emilia would be played by two different actors. But he quickly settled on Gascón, a 52-year-old Spanish actress who had herself transitioned in her 40s — and she was adamant that she would play the character both before and after. “I knew that I could do the full range in a way that nobody else could,” she said. “Using two actors would look strange, so I fought for this, just like I’ve fought all my life for others to believe in me and for me to get the roles I know I’m capable of.”
Floch-Carbonel, who did extensive makeup work to change Gascón into Manitas, worried that it might be traumatic for the actress to be taken back to a stage she had left behind in her life.
“I was really afraid of that,” she said. “I was afraid for Karla to go back to a place where maybe she was unhappy. I didn’t know that part of her, but of course, I projected that on her.” At first, they focused on the Emilia character, creating the feminine, maternal side of the transformation; once Gascón was happy with that, they began to explore who Manitas would be — an exploration that didn’t bother Gascón at all. “She’s an actress,” Floch-Carbonel said. “It’s not about her personal life. She’s a confident woman living exactly how she wants to, and she’s happy. The character of the man is just another character she’s playing.”
Gascón agreed with that take on her performance. “For me, playing Manitas was a super fun game,” she said. “It is like putting on a Halloween costume. As actors and actresses, we inhabit the body of the character we are playing. We leave ourselves behind in order to give soul to this new character so that viewers can see it. And so I gave my whole being to this role so that other people can see it on the screen. But it was also a lot of work, these two hours of makeup prosthetics. But the job that they did was absolutely spectacular.”
Then again, she did have a difference of opinion with Audiard about how Manitas should look. “I wanted the first part of the character to be more attractive than he was. At the beginning, I wanted the first part to look more like Edgar Ramírez,” she said, laughing. “Jacques wanted a modern Catherine Deneuve for Emilia — and then for Manitas, more of a hunchback of Notre Dame. So it was a real transformation, like ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”
For Floch-Carbonel, the creation of Manitas was a lengthy process. “Jacques wanted a scary persona, so we started working with prosthetics,” she said. “The first try was a little bit ’70s “Narcos.” It wasn’t really scary. And Karla has such strong features, especially the mouth, which is really full and feminine. Putting prosthetics on something like that doesn’t work. So I searched for a character who was scary and could fit in this type of film. I thought about “The Wrestler” and that kind of physicality: really tough textures and a big nose, broken nose from fighting, but also a bit of coquetry, with the grill and the eyebrow. Feminine and masculine, but scary.”
She played around with facial hair, adding a full beard and mustache — but Audiard wasn’t satisfied until she removed the mustache but left the beard. Floch-Carbonel’s team added shadows to Gascón’s forehead to make her eyes look closer together, but they also kept touches of softness in the character, who is in desperate straits when she turns to Rita, a lawyer played by Zoe Saldaña, to arrange the transition.
For Montel, it was important to use clothes to create an identity for Manitas and then tie the two characters together. “Karla put a lot of herself in the character, but Emilia is not Karla and Manitas is not Karla,” she said. “It was funny because sometimes Karla seems like a cowboy, sometimes she is like a singer, sometimes like a footballer. I thought, OK, we are making a musical, so our references for Manitas have to be out of musicals. Maybe more hip-hop style? So Post Malone was one of my big references.”
But it was crucial to foreshadow what Manitas wanted to become, too. “It was like a silk thread between the first and second parts of the story,” she said. “We have jewelry, we keep the long hair and we put him in a velvet track suit. You can feel that for a long time, he has not thought he was born in the right body.”
For the first appearance of Emilia when she meets Rita at an elegant dinner party in London, Montel wanted to draw a firm line between the character’s grungy past and elegant present; she needed to help sell the fact that Rita doesn’t initially recognize her old boss. But she also wanted to use wardrobe to underline the idea that the lawyer has herself undergone a change, giving her a dramatic, low-cut black dress to contrast with her nondescript clothes in earlier scenes.
“We had to make her invisible in the beginning,” Montel said. “She’s under the radar, she works like crazy, she’s brilliant, but her boss (in the law firm) doesn’t want her to be someone. So we made her very gray, and then in London, we wanted two shocks. First, you see Zoe and say, ‘Wow, she is so gorgeous.’ And then the second shock: ‘That’s not a new friend. Emilia is Manitas.’”
Gascón made her way through the transformation under the guidance of Audiard but also with the help of Floch-Carbonel and Montel, the latter of whom she called “that best school friend you have, and you get in trouble with the teacher together.” She laughed. “And it was the same with Julia. I learned a lot from the two of them, and I think that they gave the best of themselves to create this incredible work.”
And did they have any idea while they were making “Emilia Pérez” that it would have this much impact? “Um, yes!” Gascón said immediately in English before shifting into her usual Spanish for the rest of the answer. “While we were making the movie, we felt that we were making something beautiful, different and special. But this definitely surpassed everybody’s expectations.
“Moreover, I think that there is something that we’re not quite realizing yet, and it’s the meaning of this movie in the sense that we’re making history. We won’t see it now. But the farther we move from the movie, the more we will see the impact in history.”
This story will appear in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
