The first time Jonna Mendez wore a lifelike human mask, she became increasingly paranoid. During an undercover testing exercise, the former CIA chief of disguise had chosen to stroll through Georgetown posing as a black woman, wearing red stilettos and intricately laced gloves to cover her limbs. But when she walked into a store, she got the feeling that the woman behind the register was watching her. After quickly heading outside, she was greeted by pouring rain and intense humidity, which caused her glasses to fog up and trapped her as she waited for a security team to pick her up. “It was a nightmare,” she says. “I had a worst case scenario the very first time I wore that mask.”
Wearing it the second time went much smoother. To show President George H. W. Bush the advances in CIA mask technology, Mendez waited outside the Oval Office nervously chewing on her pencil in total disguise, this time disguised as a female colleague. Entering with a group of men, including NSA adviser Brent Scowcroft and CIA director William H. Webster, Bush asked Mendez what she had brought to show him. “I put it on and I take it off,” she said. After a brief inspection, the president gave up guessing what she was hiding, prompting Mendez to remove her mask much to the delight of the room. “It sure was cool,” she says. “If you kept it on long enough, you’d forget you had it on.”
By the early 1990s, the CIA’s mask technology had far surpassed Hollywood’s, allowing espionage work to take place within yards of unsuspecting targets and markers. Several years later, Tom Cruise pulled off the same deceptive maneuver, only this time with the help of a visual effects team and months of carefully calibrated prosthetic work. Like the Mission Impossible television series, albeit without the need for obvious editing tricks, the three-decade spy film franchise has made the wearing and revealing of masks a regular part of its films, using them in shocking moments and emphasizing their technologically superior handiwork, as the series has progressed. As a result, the practical nature and seamless application of this spycraft continued to raise questions about its mainstream and real-world use. Can one undeniably inhabit another’s skin?
The answer is complicated. In an age of digital surveillance and cyber subterfuge (which has rendered much of Mendez’s disguise work obsolete), tangible disguises depend even more on the context of a mask’s use, a person’s facial structure, and the resources available. “To make things look believable,” says makeup artist Mitchell Coughlin of Kevin Yagher Productions, “it all comes down to studying the subtle movements.” In some ways, no one will ever recreate the movie magic of using two actors, a mask, and VFX tricks to imagine a flawless silicone mug. But over the past decade, as prosthetic equipment and technology has advanced along with the rise of deepfake AI, mask quality has never been better, and transforming into someone who goes unnoticed has become much more accessible.
How spy masks have evolved
Image: Paramount Pictures
Before the CIA started making its own masks, it consulted with prosthetic makeup expert John Chambers. The craftsman responsible for the design of Spock’s ears and mask continues to work Planet of the Apes, Chambers agreed to give the agency aluminum molds and teach its members to make double stunt masks. In the 1970s, the CIA didn’t rely on anything specific – as long as a field agent watched closely from a distance and didn’t move around too much, the generic-looking masks could be useful in specific operations. “He wasn’t trying to sell us monkey masks; he was trying to be a good American citizen,” Mendez says.
Over the next decade, the agency’s disguise lab began working on its own improvements, creating “semi-animated masks,” which fit over half of a person’s face and blend into the eyes or mouth. Eventually, contracted artists developed fuller, more detailed masks, keeping them breathable and easily removable. “The requirement for our mask was that you had to be able to put it on in a parked car, in the dark, and because it was made especially for you, it would be registered,” says Mendez. “You had to have the confidence to know this thing was going to work. It was quite an assignment.” When Mendez brought the masks to Chambers to show him their advances, Mendez said he was amazed at the workmanship. “[Hollywood’s] version of reality and our version of reality were quite separate,” she says. “We needed something that would protect people.”
The details of the masks are still under wraps, but the makeup minds behind the Mission: Impossible movies have finally honed their craft with similar results. Despite their masks being augmented by visual effects trickery, the franchise’s prosthetic artists went to great lengths to get them as real as the actors they were supposed to portray. If Mission: Impossible 2 makeup supervisor Coughlin describes, the process (which can take a few months in total) begins with head casts of each actor to positively build a cast. Later, silicone—the preferred material today—is poured through a tube that fills the negative of the mask to create the skin. “Sometimes masks are great with foam — it’s just opaque and you can’t really control the translucency,” says Coughlin. “It’s always great to have an intrinsically colored [silicone] that suits the actor.”
Then the digital deceit begins. In MI:2In the plane’s first act, for example, Dougray Scott’s villainous character wears Cruise’s face on a flight to secure a virus cure, removing his mask once the passengers on board pass out. On the actual set, the filmmakers used motion-controlled cameras (capable of repeating the same movements on multiple takes), and made sure that both Cruise and Scott hit the same aisle markers so that the VFX team could put both faces on the mask and synchronize them with each other. “The reveal was really the thing that our mask was there for,” says Coughlin. “We made the masks with the eyes open so it looked like a Tom Cruise shell when it wasn’t on.”
Throughout the next few films, the process of making and applying masks became more prominent and considered part of the plot. In Mission: Impossible 3a high-tech robot scanner automatically injects a silicone mask from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mug for Cruise to wear while in Rogue state, sidekick Benji guides the IMF team through a mask-wearing plan that involves taking digital scans of his face before a 3D printer molds a mask from a sticky substance in seconds. While these quick gadgets are fictional, much of the technology shown in the franchise extrapolates techniques that prosthetic artists use every day.
“Traditional sculpting and molding techniques are still in demand, but new digital solutions are becoming more affordable and effective,” said Christopher Goodman, a concept artist and 3D sculptor at Millennium FX. In the real world, he says, a 3D printer takes much longer than a few seconds to print something and can’t produce silicone or foam latex. But the process still benefits effects teams looking for pinpoint accuracy. “3D scanning is extremely fast and reliable, digital modeling allows great flexibility and 3D printing can produce breathtaking detail,” he says. “Only recently did I design and create my first makeup, completely 3D modeled and 3D printed. Not a gram of modeling clay has been used.”
Become inseparable
In 2019, researchers from York University and Kyoto University found that current silicone masks can fool the average person into believing they are real faces. In the study, British and Japanese participants looked at pairs of photos and deciphered which face was actually a mask, and they were wrong 20% of the time, even after psychologist Rob Jenkins admitted that researchers “showed them sample masks before the test began.” Indeed, without side-by-side comparisons or recognizable faces, disguising yourself in public has become a bit easier game. In fact, today’s best silicone stores pre-sell lifelike masks Average $500 – $700. It’s no wonder why silicone masks have become a new tool for criminals.
As artificial intelligence continues to saturate every industry, optical illusions have also quickly made their way into digital spaces. That was most evident a few years ago when Miles Fisher went viral with his deepfake tom cruise videos, which showed Fisher imitating the A-lister’s mannerisms with Cruise’s actual face over his face. The videos – simple addresses for the camera – looked so real that many TikTok and Instagram users thought Cruise had made them himself. In reality, they were created by Chris Ume, a visual effects expert and co-founder of Metaphysicalwhom Fisher had initially asked for help with a parody video of Cruise running for president. “It was a fun collaboration,” says Ume. “He called me up and said, ‘This was fun, let’s do more.'”
Like a sculptor who makes molds, Ume began pulling as much footage of Cruise from films and interviews as possible, dropping his datasets into a neural network that puzzled his face onto someone else’s. Much of the work still needed Ume’s artistic touch, but it helped that Fisher has a voice, hair, and facial features that match Cruise’s. “If you work with a body double, you have to have at least some similarities. Because if I put Tom Cruise on my face, it wouldn’t work in 100 years,” says Ume. “Miles eyebrows are really big compared to Cruise and that’s not ideal, but it’s just the way he has his hair and his attitude helps a lot.” Of course, as Mendez says, the best disguises include more than just looks, especially if more surveillance and security measures are in place. Everything – gait, posture, countenance – goes in deception.
There are nefarious use cases for this kind of innovation (see: pornography), an occupational hazard in Ume’s profession. But it’s easy to see deepfake technology impacting spycraft these days, helping makeup artists build even more realistic synthetic masks – or replace them entirely.
“We could make a perfect replica of your face from data from when you were 10 years younger and use that as a reference for people working on prosthetic masks,” says Ume. Right now, Metaphysic is in the process of de-aging Tom Hanks for an upcoming Robert Zemeckis film, using the company’s same deepfake technology to build real-time software that can scan and rewind Hanks’ face 30 years to create an imperceptible digital mask. . “The goal we have is that when you watch the movie,” says Ume, “you won’t see a difference.”