Oh, the power of Tinseltown transformations. In a world of CGI, it’s sometimes easy to forget that some of Hollywood’s most elaborate movie roles actually required mounds of makeup and hours of prosthetics. Crucial to bringing memorable characters to life, special effects artists are the unsung heroes of movie magic and hold much responsibility in the art of dazzling viewers. “It’s not about technology,” Oscar-winning special effects heavyweight Stan Winston once told The New York Times. “It’s about writers writing wonderful stories with fantastic characters and me being able to create a visual image that’s beyond what you would expect.”

While some parts require famous faces to look completely unrecognizable thanks to weight gain or an overall-gruesome appearance (sorry, Josh Brolin), we’re interested in the totally insane on-screen aliens that shocked us in the most iconic sci-fi flicks to date. Even better? We had no idea who the actors were behind the masks, as they were wholly transformed into something otherworldly. Let’s take a peek at some of the most memorable movie aliens that are actually gorgeous in real life.

Ridley Scott made sure to alienate this actor on set

Bolaji Badejo was plucked up from obscurity and transformed into his first and only role — the terrifying extraterrestrial monster in the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. As revealed by Vanity Fair, the Nigerian one-time actor was scouted in a London pub, probably since he was 6’10”. Why was Badejo’s height so important? According to CNN, the graphic design student’s tall and lanky looks “matched the thin, insect-like profile” director Ridley Scott needed. Fully fitted in the suit, Badejo stood at an alarming 7 feet tall. However, it was difficult to see in the costume, which was also incredibly warm, meaning it could only be worn in 15-minute increments to avoid overheating.

Although he was good-looking in person, the rest of the cast was still afraid of Badejo. The film’s leading lady, Sigourney Weaver, mused to The Telegraph in 2010, “Bolaji was about seven feet tall and looked like he came from a different universe anyway.” She then recalled, “Ridley was very careful not to have him standing around, drinking tea with us during breaks and because he was kept apart from us and we never chatted, when it came to seeing him as this creature during a scene, it was electrifying. It didn’t feel that we were acting scared at all.”

This diva’s air of sadness came alive in the real world, too

Model and actress Maïwenn Le Besco’s rise to playing a blue-skinned alien beauty in The Fifth Element wasn’t intentional — but the story ended as tragically in real life as her somber portrayal of the opera-singing Diva.

Le Besco’s husband at the time was Luc Besson, a.k.a. the 1997 movie’s director. According to an interview the French actress once gave, she initially firmly passed on the offer when Besson asked her to embody the otherworldly part. “Thank you, but, if I love you, I want to show you my love that is pure, so I don’t want to work with you,” she recalled explaining to her beau. But after another actress Besson hired seemingly disappeared, Le Besco finally decided to step in. She would later muse in the same interview that she felt the character of the Diva was “disappointed” and “sad” — eerily foreshadowing what was to happen in her own marriage.

By the time filming for the flick ended, Besson was involved with another leading lady — Milla Jovovich, who playing Leeloo in the same movie. According to the Daily Mail, the director left Le Besco and married the future Resident Evil star that same year, only to divorce in 1999.

Zoe Saldana has become an alien staple in the sci-fi biz

Zoe Saldana has undoubtedly made her mark in the sci-fi world, playing Neytiri in 2009’s Avatar and Gamora in both the Guardians of the Galaxy series and Avengers flicks. The blue-skinned alien in the former was 70% CGI, with Saldana becoming totally unrecognizable. “I thought [Director James Cameron] did a really good job of putting Neytiri together,” the actress later told STV (via Digital Spy). “I thanked him for making her look hot. I mean, Neytiri is very sexy and lean with a really cute bod. I’m in pretty good shape, but I don’t look that buff.”

However, by the time she starred in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, being known as an intergalactic starlet was perhaps starting to get on Saldana’s nerves. “I’m not a sci-fi sex symbol. I don’t know why I’m always in space, maybe being a space babe moves me,” the Star Trek actress told The New Paper, adding, “As a woman, particularly a woman of color, the roles (set on Earth) are a little too typical for me.” While elaborating on this sentiment to The Daily Telegraph’s Stellar Magazine in 2017, Saldana noted that the sci-fi genre makes her feel “superhuman” because it doesn’t focus on “the color of my skin or my gender or my cultural background.”

This actor’s own agent didn’t even recognize him on set

Eric Bana got the Romulan transformation playing bad guy Nero in the 2009 re-imagination of Star Trek. Complete with facial tattoos and his species’ signature ears, the Aussie actor looked so different, his own agent didn’t even recognize him on set!

“I could tell in the script that I would be unrecognizable, and those opportunities in Hollywood are so rare,” Bana told The Sydney Morning Herald, revealing that he’d spend three hours every day just sitting in the makeup chair. “It was amazing, the first time you put it on and you realize that you can’t read facial expressions … Everything you’ve done before is in the bin because if you do that the audience won’t see your face move at all. So you’re sort of having to push through the prosthetics.”

Clearly, Bana did a great job of it. The film was met with critical acclaim, and years later, he’s still delighted when fans realize it’s him under the mounds of makeup. “I still get people today who just saw Star Trek and had no idea,” he told HuffPost CA in 2013, adding, “That’s a huge kick. No, I love that.”

This comedian was made to look totally terrifying

The hilarious Flight of the Conchords alum Jemaine Clement got a menacing makeover for the third installment of Men in Black in 2012, playing head-honcho bad guy Boris The Animal. What made him so unrecognizable? Maybe it was the fact that it looked like his goggles were embedded in his face. Nevertheless, Boris was genuinely hideous, and as the actor recalled, “I think the first day we put the makeup on it took eight hours.”

The best thing about the villain? He just looked so darn cool. The special effects superstar behind the project, Rick Baker, spoke to Digital Trends about making Boris come to life: “In the script I got originally, he was a biker but they described him as Dennis Hopper from Easy Rider. I said, ‘You know what? I think he should be intimidating … He should be a bearded, dark-haired, bada** f**king biker from space.'”

Apparently, the costume was so outlandish, Clement himself lived quite the lonely life when he wasn’t decked out as Boris, dishing to New Zealand’s Stuff, “When I would turn up for lunch without my makeup on, no-one would talk to me as they didn’t know who I was.”

Pom Klementieff played this bug-eyed beauty

Pom Klementieff joined the cast of Guardians of the Galaxy for the series’ sequel as the insect-looking Mantis, a humanoid alien that sports some crazy anime-looking eyes and antennae on her head. “The artists were amazing,” the actress gushed to Metro, explaining that although she wore prosthetics “at the beginning of [her] forehead,” the rest was pretty much CGI — meaning her time in the makeup chair wasn’t as brutal as, say, co-star Zoe Saldana’s grueling green body makeup.

Although the film received relatively high reviews, original comic writer and co-creator of the character, Steve Englehart, unfortunately wasn’t too impressed. “Well, I was not happy with Mantis’ portrayal,” he told Polygon. “That character has nothing to do with Mantis.” It turns out that Klementieff didn’t even read the comics before filming — because director James Gunn told her not to. “I wanted to and I asked James if I should and he said, ‘No, you don’t need to,'” she revealed to ScreenRant. “Because I knew his version was so different from the pictures and drawings that I saw, that, you know, it would kind of f**k up the — you know?” Considering she reprised her role in the Avengers franchise and will also star in the third installment of Guardians, we’d say the French actress is doing just fine.

This redhead looks totally blue thanks to Hollywood magic

Red-haired actress Karen Gillan hides her locks as the blue-bodied villain Nebula both in the Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers franchises. So popular was her small character in the first Guardians flick that by the time 2019’s Avengers: Endgame was created, she was pretty much front and center, rubbing shoulders with Robert Downey Jr.’s own Tony Stark/Iron Man. “I feel so lucky that this small character that I played in the first Guardians film got to evolve and develop so much,” the actress told The Daily Beast, adding, “I’m extremely grateful, is the main word.”

That said, Gillan admitted the costume was hard to wear. “It’s just a feeling of claustrophobia because I’m completely enclosed,” the Scottish starlet explained in an interview with Variety. “It’s a second skin that’s glued to me, it’s not painted … It’s all over, and so I can’t really move my face very much, you know? It’s a weird sensation, and it’s one that isn’t the nicest of sensations but it does look really cool and does help with the character.” She then hilariously added, “I think it’s stopping me from overacting.”

Endearingly enough, Gillan never thought she would play a superhero villain, quipping to Variety, “Especially for me, I’m from the top of Scotland in the middle of nowhere. Those are movies from a magical land called Hollywood that doesn’t actually exist.”

Brian Prince got to play this agile alien terror

Brian Prince was utterly transformed as the titular Predator in 2018’s fourth installment of the classic sci-fi franchise. Much like Bolaji Badejo, who landed the role as the original Alien, Prince is remarkably tall, coming in at “about 7 feet tall” according to Den of Geek. “I got really lucky,” he told the mag. “I was originally an art student in Atlanta, I draw comics and do illustrations and stuff. I was in Seattle, Washington, in a parkour gym — I’ve done parkour for nine years.”

However, Prince wasn’t a total newcomer, having previously used his athletic abilities to snag roles as a stunt extra on The Walking Dead, Captain America: Civil War, and Black Panther. After showcasing his abilities in a video to the film’s producers, the buff parkour vet got a call from The Predator’s stunt coordinator. “This creature’s a lot more mobile,” Prince explained. “In the other films, they’d move, for sure, but a lot of the times, in the first one, there wasn’t a lot of agile movement. So with this one, for me, they’re throwing me through things.”

Unlike Alien’s Badejo, whom the cast was intimidated by off-camera, Prince’s co-stars thought he was a total sweetie: “Olivia Munn said to me, ‘There’s no way you can play the Predator — you’re too nice.'” He certainly proved her wrong.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Dormammu

It is not traditional for the MCU to feature a titular hero in a face off with himself, but that’s what happened in Doctor Strange. Benedict Cumberbatch played both the time-warping wizard and the Dark Dimensional uberbad Dormammu — although the latter was in voice only, though he did do some facial capture work for the role. Cumberbatch has claimed it was his idea to voice the villain in the movie, saying, “I went, ‘Look, if this is going to work, rather than being a big ghoulish monster, if it’s some kind of reflection of him — if it’s something that he’s giving that’s coming back at him in a really horrific way, that would be fun! … a lot of the animation is sort of like a mirror reflection, a rippled mirror reflection, of him, of Strange.”

Although Cumberbatch is tall, that’s about where the comparisons between his appearance and Dormammu’s end. On the other hand, it didn’t take much of a makeover to ready him for the role of Doctor Strange himself — apart from the grey streaks in his hair and his delightfully odd costuming, he was very recognizable in the film’s central part, even if no one realized he was fighting against himself there at the tail end of the pic.

Andy Serkis as “Caesar” in “Rise of the planet of the apes”

Andy Serkis was fully transformed to Beast mode in this awesome Sci-fi where he play the role of Caesar as an ape, and also in the Squeal Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) which he delivered an outstanding performance playing an ape.
He also played the role of Kong in King Kong (2005) .

Josh Brolin as Thanos

To become the Mad Titan for Avengers: Infinity War, Josh Brolin had to sport a motion capture suit while acting out his scenes, and the character’s violet visage was added in by the visual effects team during and after production. Although certain parts of the actor’s appearance did make it through to the big screen — like the shape of his eyes, nose, and mouth — he does not share in Thanos’ gigantic chin, hairless head, purple skin or staggering stature in real life.

Sure, there were a lot of moviegoers who found the existence-snapping alien to be attractive in the films — the phrase “thicc Thanos” even found its way online soon after the flick hit theaters — but Thanos can’t hold a candle to the actor who portrays him when it comes to his hunk factor. Brolin, who donned an entirely different look for his other Marvel movie appearance as Cable in Deadpool 2, has traditionally handsome features and has even starred as the leading man in the romantic film scene as a result of his aesthetic appeal.

Michael James Shaw as Corvus Glaive

Another of Thanos’ minions whose appearance in Avengers: Infinity War did not quite showcase the physical beauty of the actor portraying it was Corvus Glaive, whose real-life counterpart Michael James Shaw is downright dashing, even if you would never know it from looking at the character in the film. When his face is not coated in grey paint and digitally rendered with motion capture technology to give life to the Black Order’s resident grim reaper, the up-and-comer has a strong face and sultry expressions that are sure to make fans melt.

Prior to Infinity War, Shaw might be recognized for his appearances on television shows like Constantine, Limitless, and the mini-series Roots, but even though earning a role in the MCU is a career-maker for many, chances are, fans aren’t likely to peg him as the glaive-wielding baddie on any ordinary day. Luckily, Shaw seems to have no trouble commanding a crowd with his small screen turns without all those pesky villain shrouds.

ANDY SERKIS COMES IN AGAIN AS CAESAR

We all loved one of the greatest movies of all time but a few characters made the movie a lot more fun, like the role of Gollum / Smeagol played by Andy Serkis and is known for his obsession with the ring and for always saying “My Precious” . Am sure we all have been wondering who the smeagol character was and now we know.

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Ebony Maw

You’d have a hard time picking the actor who portrayed the Black Order’s telekinetic baddie Ebony Maw out of a line-up if you didn’t already know it was Tom Vaughan-Lawlor beneath all the prosthetics. As Maw, he had a wide, long expanese in place of a nose, with speckled grey skin, wispy white hair, and almost reptilian wrinkles throughout.

In reality, though, Vaughan-Lawlor has brown hair, fair skin, and, of course, an actual nose. The actor has been seen before on the small screen with appearances in shows like Peaky Blinders, Love/Hate, and The Secret Agent, to name a few. However, none of his roles looked quite like this. The actor, who claims to have dressed up as the character while auditioning for the role, filmed his scenes while wearing a CGI suit and said that his son in particular enjoyed the results of his on-screen transformation, telling The Independent, “he thinks [it] is funny because I look so ugly.”

Ryan Reynolds as Juggernaut

Ryan Reynolds’ ruggedly handsome visage was covered up quite a bit for his leading role as Wade Wilson in Deadpool — first with severe burn marks and then with his red and black head-to-toe costuming — but he was really unrecognizable as the villain Juggernaut.

The character was digitally rendered with computer-generating imaging, but Reynolds did don some “mocap gear” to act out some of Juggernaut’s facial expressions in his scenes, in addition to voicing the character. The director justified Reynolds’ double duty as a matter of sheer convenience for everyone. “Ryan did some performance capture for certain dialogue bits. And then he provided the voice, which we altered, which allowed us to, when we we’re [sic] in post, we’re [sic] doing some alts for Deadpool,” he explained to CinemaBlend. “It’d be like, ‘Okay, let’s just switch into Juggernaut mode, try this.’ As opposed to ‘Let’s bring in somebody, wait for them, call time,’ all this. It was a tight unit. Ryan’s got another franchise!” 

So, even though Reynolds bears absolutely no resemblance to the hulking and helmeted muscleman, fans might be able to notice a familiar expression or two buried beneath all that might and metal if they look closely enough.

Ben Mendelsohn as Talos

A lot of green goes into making Ben Mendelsohn look like Talos, a Skrull commander in Captain Marvel because in real life, the actor is an Aussie hunk through and through. Mendelsohn, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in Netflix’s Bloodline, has been working his way onto the A-list in the United States ever since his appearance in 2010’s Animal Kingdom. Before he joined the MCU, you may have also seen his mask-free mug in a number of movies, including The Dark Knight Rises, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Ready Player One.

Mendelsohn has been hailed for his performance as Talos, and some Marvel fans even contend his turn in the film might single-handedly help solve the brand’s bogus villainy problem. Captain Marvel does show a bit of Mendelsohn in his real skin throughout the flick, too, but between those simple spectacle frames and his uptight S.H.I.E.L.D. gear, the actor’s rugged handsomeness is still very much concealed in the film.