Travis Knight breaks down Leto's Skeletor: practical blue-muscle suit, CG skull animated for emotion

Director Travis Knight has spelled out, in the most specific terms yet, how Jared Leto’s Skeletor was assembled in the live-action Masters of the Universe. Speaking to Brazilian journalist Pedro Borges at the Sao Paulo premiere, Knight described the figure on screen as a hybrid of a practical performance and a single, targeted CG element: the skull.

“The movie is a hybrid of sorts. There’s a lot of visual effects in the film, but there’s a lot of practical special effects in the film. So we shot on camera. If I could I wanted to get stuff in camera, wanted to shoot things practically,” Knight told Borges. “In this case, for somebody like Skeletor, we wanted to get as much stuff in camera as we could. So we have this incredible prosthetic suit put together by the prosthetic master, Barrie Gower. This muscle suit that looks like somebody, their skin has been ripped off, and you’re seeing all this blue muscle. It’s an incredible suit.”

The face, Knight said, was the only place a digital replacement made sense. “Ultimately, we replaced the face with a CG skull, and that was like when we bring that into the world of animation to really make the skull feel like it’s emoting. That it has emotion, so it didn’t just look like a sock puppet, it actually looks… It gives an amazing performance. So I’m really thrilled the way all those things, all those disciplines came together.”

Barrie Gower is the prosthetic and creature designer behind the Night King for HBO’s Game of Thrones and several of the most-discussed practical builds on The Last of Us, which is the level of credit Amazon MGM wanted on Skeletor. Knight’s comments confirm Leto performed on set every day in the blue-muscle suit and cape rather than working entirely in motion-capture, with VFX layered over the face in post.

The remarks land 8 days before the June 5 wide release and 10 days after the Hollywood premiere. They also fit with last week’s recap of the virtual press conference, in which the filmmakers said Castle Grayskull, the Sword chamber and the fight scenes were built as practical sets rather than rendered in post.

Sources:

• Masters of the Universe Director Confirms How Much CGI They Used for Jared Leto’s Skeletor
• Jared Leto’s Skeletor Process for He-Man Movie Sounds Anything but Simple
• Masters of the Universe Director on Jared Leto’s Skeletor: “The Skull Gives An Amazing Performance”