"Deadpool" is out in theaters this weekend. While Ryan Reynold's self-aware, often inappropriate antihero is definitely the star of the film, there are a few other X-Men characters who steal the spotlight.
One of those characters is Colossus, a seven-foot-tall gentle giant made out of metal who repeatedly badgers Deadpool to join the X-Men.
You've probably seen him in trailers:
While you may think Colossus is just one actor doing a motion capture performance, to bring the character to life, he was actually performed by two actors, Stefan Kapicic and veteran motion capture artist, Greg Lasalle. Typically, characters that need to be done digitally are performed by one actor doing motion capture. (A perfect example of that is Andy Serkis who has played Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" series.)
"Deadpool is an interesting test where the body capture is a typical motion capture with an actor, the voice, because Tim was adamant that he find someone who is Russian or speaks Russian fluently ... and then, the facial performance," Lasalle tells Tech Insider. "So, it’s all three of those things kind of Frankensteined together."
Kapicic performed the body work and provided the voice for Colossus while Lasalle provided facial movements for the character separately. Lasalle, who helped create the facial capture technology used by MOVA and is a motion capture supervisor on a bunch of big movies ranging from "Gravity" to "Guardians of the Galaxy," landed the role after the previous facial motion capture actor dropped out. Lasalle joked with director Tim Miller, a friend from over the years, about playing the part himself and Miller, to Lasalle's surprise, took him up on it.
While watching the film, you would never notice Colossus is played in part by two different actors.
Lasalle's experience was a little different from most actors. He had to film his parts without any other actors present. Instead, he watched what are called live plates, footage of the film, while recording his facial expressions along to audio from the movie. He memorized the audio and acted out the scenes. And then director Tim Miller would go through the performance with him again and again on loop to get certain looks just right.
Lasalle says it's not often for a motion caption performer to go it alone. But with "Deadpool," everything else was already filmed. "So I could act against those plates," he explained. "In a lot of movies that Mova’s worked on, that has not been the case, and we’ll have the actors play off each other. One standing outside of our capture system and then one performer in it."
He says it is a little difficult not having anyone else in the room to go off of while delivering your performance.
"First, you don’t have any dialogue with the other actor ... there’s no timing interaction because you’re performing to a pre-filmed plate. There’s no leeway in what timing you can do, so it’s quite challenging as an actor because you don’t just get to do all the background work on the character and then just play the character," says Lasalle. "You do all that AND you have all these restrictions on the timing of your performance."
Unfamiliar with the "Deadpool" character, Lasalle prepped for several weeks by reading as much about Colossus as he could, along with speaking with Miller.
"I took Quicktimes of the plate with the voice on it and rehearsed for weeks to get the timing down because typically the animation is done when the performance is done and then somebody goes back in and loops the audio," he explained. "More than half of these scenes are shots [with] the reverse. So, it’s trickier because you’re trying to concentrate on the timing while you’re also trying to play this character without thinking about what you’re doing because you want it to look natural, of course."
For Lasalle, acting in a film is a big change from guiding other actors through the facial capture process on set. But it's something he's been wanting to do since he even got into motion capture work.
"One of the reasons I was so intrigued by getting into motion capture is because I've always been intrigued with acting. I've just never had the guts to try and be on the camera side of that," Lasalle said. "I've always been the guy in the background. The motion capture was basically that same premise with a new technology enabling a new kind of acting, but I was still fearful to be on the other side of the cameras."
"Finally, I just said, I don't know how much time I have left, I need to go for that. It's been working extremely well," he added. "The work that I've done, that Digital Domain uses to bring in business, has been seen by everybody from Joss Whedon to Steven Spielberg and they all have positive comments about the performance. That's given me the strength to get over the little hump of being afraid to do it."
You can see Lasalle and Kapicic as Colossus in "Deadpool" now.
An earlier version of this story referred to Greg Lasalle as a co-founder of the MOVA facial performance capture system. This sentence has been clarified to say, Mr. Lasalle "helped create the facial capture technology used by MOVA." MOVA was founded by Steve Perlman.
