In addition to spending hours in the makeup chair, the actors donned giant rubber foam suits.
“To actually throw that amount of weight around, when you’re wearing a mattress pretty much, is really, really difficult,” Gower said of the foam suits. “We really put him through the wringer. I mean, he was covered in prosthetics.” And that was only half the battle. There’s also the acting.
Hoeksema met Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, and Anna Torv the first time he wore the clicker suit on set. He recalls Torv saying she couldn’t even look at him.
“Once all the makeup is on, nobody can really see me, you know what I mean? And you feel like you’re really in your own world,” Hoeksema said. “By the end, I really felt like I could just go nuts and do my thing.”
As frightening as the design and performances of the infected are in the show, luckily the real-life Cordyceps fungus does not compare. It primarily affects insects. So worry not, a clicker isn’t about to pop up at your door and turn you into a fungal zombie anytime soon.
“From a clinical infectious disease perspective, no pathogen causes such disfiguring appearance that the Cordyceps in the show appears to cause,” said Scott Roberts, associate medical director of infection prevention at the Yale School of Medicine. “I wouldn’t lose, like, a wink of sleep about this.”
Hoeksema is loving the role. If it’s up to him, he’ll be back for Season 2, wreaking more havoc as a clicker, bloater or whatever infected stage there’s left.
“I would run around in that makeup for the rest of my life,” he said. “I mean, I’ll do it in a wheelchair when I’m like 90 years old and be a geriatric clicker.” ●
