After a protracted day on the set of “A Haunting in Venice,” the most recent Kenneth Branagh murder-mystery based mostly on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot tales, the hair and make-up designer Wakana Yoshihara would depart the crew, discover a quiet area and sit down with the detective’s prodigious mustache, a sweeping half-moon of lush grey hair and attendant soul patch.
“It was my ritual each night time after the shoot,” Yoshihara mentioned just lately in a video interview. “Me and the mustache sit collectively. Typically I’ve a dialog with the mustache. It was very therapeutic, while you get into that area. The mustache turned like a buddy.”
Yoshihara takes facial hair very significantly. The hair and make-up designer for “Loss of life on the Nile” (2022) and “A Haunting in Venice,” opening Friday, she is liable for creating, styling and sustaining Poirot’s whiskers — a painstaking work of workmanship that’s maybe a very powerful element in these interval movies. “This mustache is critical enterprise,” the director and star Branagh said when he took on the well-known position for the 2017 “Homicide on the Orient Categorical.” Yoshihara has made that enterprise her personal, and she or he doesn’t take it evenly.
The primary iteration of Branagh’s Poirot mustache was created for “Orient Express” by the designer Carol Hemming, with whom Yoshihara labored intently as the pinnacle of the hair and make-up departments. The colossal grey swath of hair was meant to pay tribute to Poirot’s army background and the vogue after World Warfare I.
However whereas the mustache appeared suitably grand, it was heavy and ungainly, and introduced many sensible difficulties for Branagh as a performer. The star (who additionally directed however couldn’t be interviewed due to the present actors’ strike) was unable to open his mouth large or snigger heartily with out the hairpiece drooping or falling misplaced. “You couldn’t make jokes round him on set,” Yoshihara mentioned.
When Yoshihara took over for Hemming on the sequel, “Death on the Nile,” the very first thing she mentioned with Branagh was what they had been to do concerning the mustache this time. “We talked about downsizing,” she mentioned. “It may be smaller however nonetheless sufficiently big for him to have the signature of being Poirot. We took some off each side and sort of narrowed it down so it doesn’t fairly cowl his mouth.”
For “Venice,” Branagh initially needed to develop his personal mustache to Poirot size to obviate the necessity for the prosthetic. Whereas the size was enough, Yoshihara bumped into issues with the styling. To get the look proper, she mentioned, “I must use a perm, and I can’t actually use a sizzling stick so near his face, as a result of I’d burn him.” Ultimately, she opted to have him shave what he’d grown, and the 2 went again to the same old technique — albeit with extra refinements.
Yoshihara and Branagh revised the false mustache even additional for “Venice,” making it barely smaller once more and blonder. (The hue was meant to present Branagh a “younger” look that might stave off the impression Poirot was getting older and older between movies.) She defined that Poirot was on trip within the desert in “Nile,” which gave the mustache a windswept, pure character, however in “Venice,” Poirot is retired with extra freedom to take care of his grooming. “We made it seem like he had a lot of time on his arms,” she mentioned. “It’s extra sculpted. It’s neater. It’s like Poirot has lastly discovered his greatest type.”
The false mustache itself is a mixture of human and yak hair. The human sort “is a bit too silky” and tender, she mentioned, however the yak addition ends in a bushier, extra bristly look acceptable for a mustache. The strands are meticulously woven into a skinny strip of silk. When she receives that woven strip from the wigmaker, Yoshihara mentioned, “it appears like a cave man’s hair, very lengthy, so you need to reduce it and elegance it.” Yoshihara works from a plaster mannequin of Branagh’s head to get the mustache precisely symmetrical. Then, when it’s time to movie, she applies it on to Branagh’s face with a particular adhesive just like tremendous glue.
Regardless of the trouble concerned in creating and making use of the prosthetic, the consequence ought to nonetheless “look pure and never made up,” as if the hair had been actually rising on his face. Putting the best steadiness between naturalistic and theatrical meant dozens of display exams with pattern mustaches, every of a barely completely different size, form and shade. “You want that trial and error to know what appears mistaken and what appears proper,” she mentioned. On “Loss of life on the Nile,” she mentioned, they went by way of so many choices that they didn’t in the end determine on one till the primary day of the shoot.
Branagh saved his false mustache on in the course of the lengthy days of capturing “Orient Categorical,” however discovered it difficult to eat. “Egg yolk is the killer. Or any noodles,” Yoshihara mentioned, including, “It took a lot time to eat that on this movie we determined it could be sooner to simply take away the mustache at lunch and reapply it after lunch. I needed to hover round Ken throughout meals.”
The prosthetic was eliminated by gently making use of isopropyl alcohol to the adhesive. “You may get drunk simply sniffing it,” she mentioned, “so you need to be very cautious.”
One of many largest challenges on “Venice” was the introduction of a brand new enemy, one of many largest nemeses of any hairpiece: water. At one level, Poirot is plunged underwater and thrashes about for his life. It brought on Yoshihara a substantial amount of stress on set. She remembers the primary assistant director, Martin Curry, teasing her relentlessly as they had been getting ready to shoot the sequence. “He was laughing at me, like, ‘Wakana, the mustache will get moist! What are you going to do?’” As a result of the hair and the adhesive may solely face up to a lot wetness and nonetheless hold its form, the crew needed to reduce the variety of underwater takes. “You can solely shoot that two or 3 times, no extra,” she mentioned.
Yoshihara did have backup mustaches in case her favourite suffered an excessive amount of put on and tear in the course of the shoot. However she mentioned it was unimaginable to make each precisely alike. “We used that one till we killed it,” she mentioned. “It bought so floppy that we couldn’t use it anymore.” After all, having developed such an in depth bond with the mustache, she mentioned, watching it deteriorate wasn’t straightforward.
“I’d really feel so unhappy when the mustache was dying,” she mentioned. “As a result of the mustache had a life — and he’d had sufficient.”
