Connie Britton has spoken about the painstaking face-alteration process behind her dual role in Hulu’s new series Phony, in which she appears as the mother of Sam Nivola’s character and an apparent impostor.
The coming-of-age mystery follows a teenager who wakes in hospital after a car accident and discovers that his mother — his only parent and closest friend — seems to have been replaced.
Connie Britton’s face transformation for Phony
Britton, 59, initially underwent a prosthetics process for the role. However, the production team decided the results did not provide the subtlety and detail required.
“We started with prosthetics,” Britton told People. “We did a whole kind of prosthetics journey and shot a bunch of it with prosthetics and realized that that was not gonna give us exactly what we needed in terms of the subtlety and just the detail.”
The crew then developed a different technique while filming, making detailed alterations to Britton’s appearance frame by frame.
“It was really a very complicated process, very labor intensive, very time consuming,” she said. “I think that they were still making changes a week before [the release] — like, a week ago!”
Britton also said the project’s creator, Nick Paley, had a “very unusual vision” for the series, which attracted her to it from the outset.
“It felt immediately like something that I hadn’t really seen before,” she said.
The first two episodes of Phony are now available, with further episodes due to be released weekly.
