By Frazer Harrison/Getty

Best makeup and hairstyling is one of the few Oscar categories that features a “bake-off,” a gathering to the category’s finalists as they show off a 10-minute reel of their best work on the film. For Bill Corso, one of two makeup artists behind Foxcatcher to eventually be nominated in the category, he was going up against massive alien creatures (Guardians of the Galaxy) or movies with dozens and dozens of characters (The Grand Budapest Hotel). So to stand out from the crowd, Corso went small. And showed off Steve Carell’s eyes.

Well, not just the eyes—Carell famously underwent a complete transformation to play John du Pont in the film, from dentures to a shaved hairline to a new nose. But Corso showed off the shot that focused on Carell’s eyes because it demonstrated his real challenge on the film: making complicated, face-altering makeup that looked good in long takes, under natural light, and in extreme close-up.

“No matter how good or bad you do your makeup, you can always fall back on the fact that the camera is moving,” says Corso, who won the Oscar for his work on Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and was nominated for Click. “Bennett doesn’t shoot his movies like that.”

Corso was challenged not just with making his lead actors look like the real people they were playing—he says that Channing Tatum in particular was committed to looking like the real Mark Schultz—but making them look like wrestlers, which involved cauliflower ears, broken noses, and even subtler overall makeup effects. “We tried to flatten out their faces,” Corso says, which included plugs to flatten his nostrils and plumpers to enlarge his jaw. “You look at Channing and you can’t quite place it.” Corso says that, any time Tatum needed to get himself in character, “he would just sit and stare at himself in the mirror.”

Courtesy of Sony Classics.

Mark Ruffalo had an even more dramatic hairline shave than Carell in order to play Dave Schultz, and even growing in his own beard didn’t keep him from that stop in the makeup chair. “Dave’s was much fuller and it grew differently,” explains Corso. Ruffalo even underwent alterations to look more like his on-screen brother. “We put little brackets in the back of his ears to make his ears stick out so he looked more like Channing.”