When Karla Sofía Gascón began talking with Jacques Audiard about starring in his audacious musical crime drama Emilia Pérez, she found herself keenly excited by the challenge of portraying the title role: a menacing drug lord seeking to undergo gender affirmation surgery so that she might finally live as her authentic self. “It’s a bit as if Beauty and the Beast were locked in the same body,” she explains. “When the film opens, she is Manitas, a woman who’s confined in a body she doesn’t belong in, but who finds herself at a point where she has the opportunity to leave her life behind — a life she wants no part of anymore.”

With her fearless performance, Gascón pulled off one of the most singular acting feats in cinema history, embodying both the intimidating criminal and the luminous woman who later emerges ready to atone for the sins of her past. For her committed starring turn, Gascón became the first transgender woman to win the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival, sharing the honor with her co-stars Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz, after the film premiered on the Croisette in May.

Notably, as Gascón was developing the character’s psychology, she also was collaborating closely on both Manitas and Emilia’s physical appearances with the film’s makeup and hair artists Julia Floch-Carbonel, Simon Livet, Emmanuel Janvier, Romain Marietti, and Jane Brizard and special effects makeup artist Jean-Christophe Spadaccini. “I was frequently astonished by the reflection staring back at me,” Gascón says of the hours she spent in the makeup chair for the film. “Seeing those faces emerge in the mirror before I walked on set helped anchor my performance and centered me as an artist.”

Just as the star herself had been keen to embark on the project, so, too, were the artists tasked with creating two very distinct looks for Gascón. “We had to imagine a big contrast between cold-hearted killer Manitas and generous loving Emilia,” explains co-makeup department head Floch-Carbonel. “The reality is that Karla Sofía Gascón is a very beautiful woman with magnificent full lips and feline eyes, and we had to play around that. We still needed [to find] Manitas’s ‘scary’ side while some of Karla’s feminine features remained.”

In crafting the drug lord’s look, the creative team, guided by the film’s artistic director and costume designer Virginie Montel, found inspiration in Mickey Rourke’s burly Randy “The Ram” Robinson from Darren Aronofsky’s Oscar-nominated drama The Wrestler and global popstar Post Malone. The weathered character, Floch-Carbonel says, had “the type of face [of someone] who fought with bare hands but also kept a certain coquetry and ornament.”

Working with both Gascón and Spadaccini, Floch-Carbonel and Livet covered Manitas’s body with tattoos, giving the character long dark hair, a beard, thin eyebrows, metal teeth, and facial tattoos. “The main idea was to make her look virile and aggressive and intimidating,” says Spadaccini, whose credits include another Audiard production, The Sisters Brothers.

Spadaccini created prosthetic pieces — including a nose, cheeks, and jaw, all pock-marked with acne scars — that could be applied to Gascón’s face to make the star appear as masculine as possible. “The nose was the most challenging part of Manitas’s complex face prosthetics,” he says. “I used a silicone prosthetic nose with transfer cheeks to blend the edges. This technique allowed the filming of incredibly close-up shots without the need to touch up with [visual effects during] postproduction.”

Throughout the design process, the makeup artists were in constant communication with the performer to ensure she felt safe and comfortable with every creative decision. “We all did a lot of research, but the most important thing was Karla’s testimonial and advice about the character,” says co-makeup department head Livet. “Besides the technical challenge, my fears were that [the] process would hurt Karla psychologically and throw her to the past, but she was really centered and happy with the result,” Floch-Carbonel recalls. “She embraced [Manitas], body language, voice — even her way of walking changed completely. It was amazing to see and a relief for me.” 

“As a rule, I like to play characters who are as far away from me as possible — and Manitas has nothing to do with me,” says Gascón. “Portraying Emilia was much more challenging. I had to wear a corset that restricted my movements, a wig that held my head tightly, and high heels. With Manitas, after being made up and having prosthetics applied on my face, I was free to move as I wished.”

Indeed, the contrasts between the two incarnations of Emilia are stark. Once she achieves her wish of being able to move through the world as her true self, Emilia’s aesthetic is “elegant, versatile, and always sexy,” says Floch-Carbonel. “She wears beautiful colors, shiny fabrics, and playful prints as a proud Mexican lady likes to do.” 

Portraying a woman who is always impeccably put-together came with its own complexities, says Gascón, but as an artist, she found the process of embodying the emancipated Emilia tremendously satisfying. “Emilia lacked [a] physical freedom because she always had to be perfect — society has this requirement for women to always be perfect. And that happened to me when I was playing Emilia," Gascón explains. "I always felt like, Oh, she’s not perfect enough. So Emilia was harder to play, but at the same time, it was more beautiful because we found these new dimensions for this character.”