Christopher Abbott on becoming the “Wolf Man”: 'It's a surreal experience' that 'borders on being absolutely ridiculous'

Christopher Abbott didn't have the expected reaction to seeing himself in the mirror for the first time as "the Wolf Man" of Leigh Whannell's upcoming horror film.

"I laughed immediately," he admits to Entertainment Weekly of witnessing the prosthetics and makeup in action. "It's insane. You have your imagination, you read the script, and even seeing the designs, I was prepared for it, but once you see yourself in it, it's a surreal experience, and it borders on being absolutely ridiculous."

His costar, Julia Garner, had the response Whannell and prosthetics designer Arjen Tuiten were probably going for. "It was terrifying and gross and also super intriguing all at once," she says. "After three days, I got used to it, but still, there was always some new discovery within his face or the back of his head or his chest or anything that I did not see before. I felt like I was discovering something new every day with that prosthetic."

Abbott reveals more of what went into that transformation, which will be on full display when Wolf Man opens in theaters this Friday. The prosthetics forced him to rehearse in the mirror to figure out exactly what his face would look like for the camera. At the very least, he needed the confidence that he could still emote under all that material. "While the movie is scary," Abbott adds, "you always want to try to find some heart in it, some tragedy in it even towards the later stages, the glimmers of human or father still in there."

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The actor, known for his role in Girls and in films like Sanctuary and Poor Things, stars as Blake, a stay-at-home father to the young Ginger (Matilda Firth). He struggles in his marriage to high-powered journalist Charlotte (Garner). So when he inherits his childhood farmhouse in rural Oregon after his missing dad is legally presumed dead, Blake hopes the trip to the property will help repair his relationship. However, they are immediately attacked by a ferocious creature that seems not fully animal, not fully human. They manage to barricade themselves inside the house for safety, but Blake's exposure to this beast slowly begins to change him into the very thing they just fended off.

Developing the rules for how his werewolves worked, Whannell thought of it as a disease, which then informed the look of the creatures. It starts with the infection from a scratch and then spreads to the brain, changing the skin along the way through the body. "I was researching certain diseases and kind of pressing them together," Whannell explains. "There were elements of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, leprosy. I didn't want to over-explain it in the movie. I still wanted the whole thing to feel like this guy doesn't know what's happening to him, and neither does his family."

There are, therefore, multiple stages to Abbott's transformation as more prosthetics are layered on as the timeline progresses. In one scene, as the infection spreads to Blake's mind, warping his face, Abbott must bite into the prosthetics on his arm to show Blake reacting to the irritation from his wound. "It's very sweet," he says of the corn syrup mix that went into the fake blood. "So I guess it's not terrible. I mean, it's nauseating after a while, but it's not the worst thing in the world."

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With a script Whannell wrote with wife Corbett Tuck, the director chose to show the audience Blake's own perspective as he succumbs to the werewolf virus. Lights are brighter. Charlotte's eyes appear to glow blue, making her nearly unrecognizable. Sound is distorted. A spider walking calmly up a wall in an upstairs closet feels as audibly jarring as falling furniture, while Charlotte's speech sounds garbled, as if she's trying to speak underwater. Blake feels locked in a completely separate world and desperately tries to claw his way back to reality.

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Whannell and cinematographer Stefan Duscio experimented with infrared and UV cameras to enhance those scenes, while sound designers P.K. Hooker and Will Files worked on distorting Garner's voice. According to the director, he wrote dialogue for Garner. Hooker and Files would then "twist the words around."

"Think back to The Exorcist," Whannell says. "What they did with [Linda Blair's possessed Regan], running it backwards. It was our version of that, but instead of running it backwards, we were bending it and stretching it like a pretzel. We would run some fill words backwards and twist them around other words."

"A lot of that was done in-camera and very practically," Abbott recalls of filming those scenes. "You can add color to it in post, but, for example, when the perspective would switch on set, the lights would change, and it made it almost theatrical, a dramatic space to work in."

Related: Christopher Abbott transforms into a monster in hair-raising Wolf Man trailer

"We had rehearsal with that sequence with the camera movement and everything," Garner adds. "It was almost like a dance."

The final stage of Blake's transformation is the culmination of Abbott's physical performance (he calls it his most physical role to date) and even more overt body prosthetics, including fake teeth and claws. Whannell became inspired by the work of David Cronenberg, including 1986's The Fly, in wanting to go "full body horror" with his movie. Once Abbott got over that initial laugh of seeing himself as the Wolf Man, he wanted his performance to match the drama of the look.

"It makes you want to take a swing that much more," he says. "In a good way, I get to hide behind it. So then there is less self-acting judgment."

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