Why Olivia Colman Didn’t Get Splinters from Getting Intimate With Alexander Skarsgård’s ‘Wicker’ Costume

Believe the hype. “Wicker,” now in theaters, is every bit as horny, romantic and wonderful as the trailer leads you to believe.

Olivia Colman plays a spinster fisherwoman in a medieval community where marriage is what gives a woman worth. Although she is a fierce independent woman, the village mocks her as she goes about making her living. One day she goes to the local basket weaver, played by Peter Dinklage, and asks him to make her a wicker husband.

Enter Alexander Skarsgård — yes, that is him under all that makeup — wearing a practical suit and prosthetic makeup to transform him into a basket man.

It began with Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who were adapting Ursula Wills’ short story “The Wicker Husband.” Weta Workshop artists, prosthetic makeup designer Joe Dunckley and lead makeup FX artist Sarah Rubano received the script and a call from the writers and directors who told them, “We want to make this practically,” says Dunckley. “They wanted a piece of beautiful concept art that showed their vision.”

The pair spent 18 months in research and development alone. Because prosthetic makeup materials are manufactured to imitate human flesh and skin, it posed a challenge. “This guy is made of wicker, so we had to do it a different way,” Dunckley says. He continues, “We tested our theory. We thought that if we could get the strands of the weave to be individual and get them to move as if they were individual muscle fibers that drove his movement, then he could be a believable sentient wicker being.”

But they couldn’t mold it, so the pair were pushed toward modern innovation using 3D digital sculpting and 3D printing.

They began with a full-body scan of Skarsgård so they could sculpt pieces specific to him.

The intricate basket weave was created using a relatively new powder-bed laser-sintered printing process. Dunckley explains, “It’s a volume of thermoplastic…