In "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," you may have been wondering whether Rey's cruel and crude junk boss Unkar Plutt was done digitally, like Maz Kanata and Snoke, or a man in a costume. The answer: both.
In an interview with Nerdist, the film's creature shop head Neal Scanlan revealed how the "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" crew transformed English actor Simon Pegg into Unkar Plutt, the grotesque scrapyard leader in Jakku. Scanlan was responsible for designing the many droids, robots, and aliens inhabiting "The Force Awakens."
Turning Pegg into Plutt meant combining two different types of effects: makeup and prosthetics applied to his face and his suit and using digital effects, added in post-production.
" ... it was a prosthetic that we applied to Simon,” Scanlan told the site, “but then the guys later remodeled the front of the face, and they moved the eyes out."
Scanlan's team used the real-life mask of Plutt that Simon wore as a base, which they then altered and readjusted using CG effects to make Plutt stand out as particularly grotesque.
"I think they did a little bit of CG enhancement on the inside of the mouth as well, to give him a slightly wider gape in his mouth than what you could do in real life," he said. "Obviously, it would have just been Simon’s mouth otherwise, so yeah, brilliant. Stretch the eyes and stretch the mouth, and gave it that sort of twist to make it feel like it couldn’t just be a person in a suit.”
The team used video of Pegg’s facial expressions as a reference for how to animate Plutt's face. The finished product was a monstrous, yet very memorable, character.