Prosthetics artist worked on Banshee of Inisherin

Having been laid off from his job as an architect during the economic downturn of the noughties, Matthew Smith embarked on a very different career path. Since then, he has worked with some of the most famous names in Hollywood such as Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson through his job as a prosthetics artist where he makes fake body parts for major productions.

However, his second career initially started off as a hobby, as the Arva man explains.

“I used to do it as a bit of it as a hobby before I got laid off, but I was always interested in art. I did it as an extra subject in my Leaving Cert in the Convent in Granard. When I started going out with my wife Caroline, we would have entered the fancy dress so I would always have taken a day or two, even two days off work, to make something for that."

When the chance came to make a go of it as a career, Matthew seized the opportunity.

"I said I’d just give it a try. I did a short course in the UK on it. When I came home, I just asked for a few different masks around for jobs like seeing what was happening in Ireland. I started off working on programmes like Camelot, Love/Hate and Game Of Thrones, they were quite big shows to start off but often they're the only shows that use prosthetics."

Although he only did a brief course before starting off, Matthew contends experience is the best form of education when it comes to working in film and TV.

“If you’re learning on the job, you’re learning from the best people who are up to date, whereas a college lecturer might have old techniques and may not be up to date with methods from the field. It’s always updating, you have to keep up or you’ll fall behind.”

"When you come in on the job, you start as a trainee and you do small things, and you're watching other people do stuff and you pick it up from them... Then you go on to be an assistant or then there's my assistant and a head of a department," explained Matthew.

A recent production with which Matthew was involved was Martin Mc Donagh’s 'The Banshee of Inisherin', which starred Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan.

Matthew was responsible for applying prosthetic fingers to Brendan Gleeson’s hand, in a most memorable scene.

“I applied Brendan’s hand in the Banshee of Inisherin. I cast his hand and somebody in the UK made the individual pieces. I’d normally make them, but I was working on a different project at the time. I then glued them onto him and followed him around for the day to make sure that they didn’t fall off. That was a silicone hand and it was applied onto his own hand, I’d glue it and blend it in with make-up to make it look real,” revealed Matthew of his role.

Making and applying prosthetic features is a most technical, time-consuming job with the pieces often made weeks in advance of production.

"It may take three or four hours to apply makeup and a few weeks or months to make a single fake head. Often I’m under a lot of pressure to get stuff finished, especially with streaming services as they seem to give less and less time to get stuff made,” he outlined of the challenge.

Despite this pressure to finish pieces on time, Matthew contends that, if it is not finished to a high standard, then it can have a negative impact on the quality of the production.

“Sometimes if it’s a fake head, you can do it fast enough. But if the eyes have to be open at all, it'll take a lot longer because everyone just looks at the eyes. So if they're anyway wrong, it just throws the whole lot off. Every edge has to be blended. Your mould, sculpt and application of the makeup have to be perfect. You might not think it’s important because, if you can see something that doesn’t look real in the film, it can ruin the illusion for a viewer and take them out of what they are watching,” explained Matthew.

Despite this, it’s not uncommon for something that has taken weeks of work to get only seconds of screen time in the background of a scene or get completely cut out altogether, according to Matthew, especially if something goes wrong.

“There’s lots of trial and error on set. Sometimes you’re on set and a character’s throat is getting slit and there's no blood coming out to see the blood coming out of their costume, so a tube has come loose or, you know, or just got tangled. If you have the time, it's always good to test off. Sometimes you don't. And sometimes they go to say it's just hoping this is going to work out. Or you get asked by a director to make something on the fly on set. That can be quite stressful. Some things may only make a brief appearance on camera, sometimes I make things like a head that might be three or four weeks making but are only in the shot for two seconds or they may only appear in the background.”

Often scheduling complications sometimes mean that some of Matthew’s designs are cut out from films.

“There's a first assistant director on sets who keeps the whole thing on time. They have a schedule for the scenes that need to get done every day. So if you're holding them up for five or ten minutes they just say 'leave it out' and they move on to the next scene. I might spend a month making something and it never gets seen. I used to get frustrated by this but not so much anymore unless it’s something I really want to get used.”

The advent of major streaming sites over the past decade has led to an increase in the number of programmes being made, which leads to more stable work for prosthetic artists.

“Netflix and Amazon have brought a lot of work over here, it’s busy here in places like Limerick, Belfast and Wicklow. I don’t really have to go away. I was in Prague twice for TV shows called The Wheel of Time and Carnival Row, which was hard to be away from my family for so long, now I don’t have to go nearly as often," said Matthew who's delighted to be at home for Christmas.