First Look: Benicio Del Toro as the Wolfman

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 19, 2008

When it comes to delivering intense make-up jobs, there is one man that Hollywood always looks to when it needs the good stuff: Rick Baker. He has done everything from transforming Eddie Murphy into a fat family in The Nutty Professor to giving Hellboy his horns. He most recently landed his 11th Oscar nomination for his work on Norbit. His next project is with the Universal horror masterpiece remake of The Wolf Man, in which he will turn Benicio Del Toro into the ferocious dog/man hybrid himself.

EW has scored an awesome first look at Del Toro in full Wolfman mode, which can be seen below:

At first glance you can’t even tell that it is Del Toro under there, but once you look closer you will see it. Overall, the make-up job looks amazing, the kind of stuff that we have come to expect from Rick Baker. When asked about Benicio Del Toro’s already wolf-like features, Baker admitted that it makes it a little harder to show the full transformation:

“In a way, it almost makes it harder. Where do you go from there? He’s practically there as it is! [Laughs] I think what’s going to make it be harder is when we get into the transformation scenes; going from Benicio to Benicio as the Wolfman isn’t a really extreme difference. Like when I did American Werewolf in London, we went from this naked man to a four-legged hound from hell, and we had a lot of room to go from the transformation and do a lot of really extreme things. Here we have Benicio Del Toro, who’s practically the Wolfman already, to Benicio Del Toro with more hair and bigger teeth.”

As much as I like the look and am excited to have seen it, I’m not sure about them releasing photos so early. Wouldn’t it have been cooler to wait until closer to the film’s release to show us the full Wolfman, keep us salivating over it? I don’t know… Maybe. I just think that had we seen the Cloverfield monster back in the summer of last year, it certainly would have ruined the experience. Then again, this is the Wolfman, not the Cloverfield monster. I digress.

The Wolf Man hits theaters on February 13, 2009. It is being directed by Joe Johnston and will co-star Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving.

Sound Off: What do you think of Benicio’s fully transformed Wolfman?

Source: EW

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