Leonardo DiCaprio was so impressed with Gary Oldman's look in Darkest Hour he's trying to lure his make-up guru out of retirement for his new Quentin Tarantino film.
The Revenant star has signed on to play an ageing actor in Tarantino's new Manson Family murders movie, and it looks as if he'll be calling on the services of Kazuhiro Tsuji to make him look unrecognisable.
Oldman reveals DiCaprio has asked for the make-up artist's details: "He's got something brewing where he has to gain the weight for it," Gary explains. "He came to me the other night and asked me, who's the guy who did my make-up, adding, 'I want to give him a call!'"
The 2018 Oscars Best Actor favourite reveals he first worked with Tsugi two decades ago, when he was "almost an ape" in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes.
"I had a head cast and that's as far as it got," he explains. "It didn't work out but Kazu's work with Apes and Men In Black and even The Grinch... He retired from the movie industry, but I said to (Darkest Hour director) Joe Wright, 'The only man on the planet who could even remotely pull this off is Kazu'.
"It wasn't completely contingent on Kazu doing it, but that's who I wanted. I met him and seduced him out of retirement to please come and do this. I think he lived up to the task."
Oldman's make-up has won almost as much praise as the actor's performance, and now Gary insists there's no reason for an actor to gain a lot of weight for a film role.
"I'm nearly 60 and I thought I'd have to gain 70 pounds or more to even remotely get the neck or the jowls...," the actor explains. "It was always going to be make-up, rather than me do that. It's too unhealthy. Especially at 60, you're changing your metabolism so dramatically that you've got the liver, the heart, the kidneys... It would be foolish to do it, especially if you could do it convincingly another way."
