Humor
MasterClass: The Art of Acting in a Fat Suit
Everything thin actors need to know, from putting on prosthetics to penning an Oscar acceptance speech.
OVERVIEW
Fat people make us laugh. They make us cry. They make us uncomfortable unless they’re actually a thin actor wearing a fat suit. And so, for over a century, the motion picture industry has relied on various methods of special effects magic — from stuffing pillows into shirts and sewing hula hoops into trousers to meticulously crafted silicone bellies and foam rubber butts — in order to tell the compelling stories of fat characters without resorting to hiring an actual fat person to play those characters. In this MasterClass, any (skinny!) actor can learn time-tested techniques to master the art of fat suit acting.
LESSON PLAN
Why Hollywood Uses Fat Suits
Why would they hire and pay an A-list actor’s salary plus add the additional expense of daily prosthetics budget when they could just hire a fat actor? You’ll hear major producers, directors, and film studio executives — many of them slightly overweight themselves — explain that they just can’t buy the kind of publicity that comes from an audience watching a movie trailer and going “Wait, that’s Jared Leto?”
