The Many Mustaches of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot

After a protracted day on the set of “A Haunting in Venice,” the newest Kenneth Branagh murder-mystery primarily based on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot tales, the hair and make-up designer Wakana Yoshihara would depart the crew, discover a quiet house and sit down with the detective’s prodigious mustache, a sweeping half-moon of lush grey hair and attendant soul patch.

“It was my ritual every night after the shoot,” Yoshihara mentioned not too long ago in a video interview. “Me and the mustache sit together. Sometimes I have a conversation with the mustache. It was very therapeutic, when you get into that space. The mustache became like a friend.”

Yoshihara takes facial hair very severely. The hair and make-up designer for “Death on the Nile” (2022) and “A Haunting in Venice,” opening Friday, she is liable for creating, styling and sustaining Poirot’s whiskers — a painstaking work of workmanship that’s maybe an important element in these interval movies. “This mustache is serious business,” the director and star Branagh mentioned when he took on the well-known function for the 2017 “Murder on the Orient Express.” Yoshihara has made that enterprise her personal, and he or she doesn’t take it flippantly.

The first iteration of Branagh’s Poirot mustache was created for “Orient Express” by the designer Carol Hemming, with whom Yoshihara labored intently as the top of the hair and make-up departments. The colossal grey swath of hair was meant to pay tribute to Poirot’s navy background and the vogue after World War I.

But whereas the mustache regarded suitably grand, it was heavy and ungainly, and introduced many sensible difficulties for Branagh as a performer. The star (who additionally directed however couldn’t be interviewed due to the present actors’ strike) was unable to open his mouth vast or snigger heartily with out the hairpiece drooping or falling misplaced. “You couldn’t make jokes around him on set,” Yoshihara mentioned.

When Yoshihara took over for Hemming on the sequel, “Death on the Nile,” the very first thing she mentioned with Branagh was what they have been to do concerning the mustache this time. “We talked about downsizing,” she mentioned. “It can be smaller but still big enough for him to have the signature of being Poirot. We took some off both sides and kind of narrowed it down so it doesn’t quite cover his mouth.”

For “Venice,” Branagh initially needed to develop his personal mustache to Poirot size to obviate the necessity for the prosthetic. While the size was enough, Yoshihara bumped into issues with the styling. To get the look proper, she mentioned, “I would have to use a perm, and I can’t really use a hot stick so close to his face, because I might burn him.” In the top, she opted to have him shave what he’d grown, and the 2 went again to the standard methodology — albeit with extra refinements.

Yoshihara and Branagh revised the false mustache even additional for “Venice,” making it barely smaller once more and blonder. (The hue was meant to present Branagh a “more youthful” look that might stave off the impression Poirot was getting older and older between movies.) She defined that Poirot was on trip within the desert in “Nile,” which gave the mustache a windswept, pure character, however in “Venice,” Poirot is retired with extra freedom to take care of his grooming. “We made it look like he had lots of time on his hands,” she mentioned. “It’s more sculpted. It’s neater. It’s like Poirot has finally found his best style.”

The false mustache itself is a mix of human and yak hair. The human form “is a bit too silky” and gentle, she mentioned, however the yak addition ends in a bushier, extra bristly look acceptable for a mustache. The strands are meticulously woven into a skinny strip of silk. When she receives that woven strip from the wigmaker, Yoshihara mentioned, “it looks like a cave man’s hair, very long, so you have to cut it and style it.” Yoshihara works from a plaster mannequin of Branagh’s head to get the mustache precisely symmetrical. Then, when it’s time to movie, she applies it on to Branagh’s face with a particular adhesive just like tremendous glue.

Despite the trouble concerned in creating and making use of the prosthetic, the consequence ought to nonetheless “look natural and not made up,” as if the hair have been actually rising on his face. Striking the fitting steadiness between naturalistic and theatrical meant dozens of display assessments with pattern mustaches, every of a barely totally different size, form and shade. “You need that trial and error to know what looks wrong and what looks right,” she mentioned. On “Death on the Nile,” she mentioned, they went by means of so many choices that they didn’t finally resolve on one till the primary day of the shoot.

Branagh stored his false mustache on throughout the lengthy days of capturing “Orient Express,” however discovered it difficult to eat. “Egg yolk is the killer. Or any noodles,” Yoshihara mentioned, including, “It took so much time to eat that on this film we decided it would be faster to just remove the mustache at lunch and reapply it after lunch. I had to hover around Ken during meals.”

The prosthetic was eliminated by gently making use of isopropyl alcohol to the adhesive. “You can get drunk just sniffing it,” she mentioned, “so you have to be very careful.”

One of the most important challenges on “Venice” was the introduction of a brand new enemy, one of many largest nemeses of any hairpiece: water. At one level, Poirot is plunged underwater and thrashes about for his life. It triggered Yoshihara quite a lot of stress on set. She remembers the primary assistant director, Martin Curry, teasing her relentlessly as they have been making ready to shoot the sequence. “He was laughing at me, like, ‘Wakana, the mustache will get wet! What are you going to do?’” Because the hair and the adhesive may solely stand up to a lot wetness and nonetheless maintain its form, the crew needed to decrease the variety of underwater takes. “You could only shoot that two or three times, no more,” she mentioned.

Yoshihara did have backup mustaches in case her favourite suffered an excessive amount of put on and tear throughout the shoot. But she mentioned it was unattainable to make each precisely alike. “We used that one until we killed it,” she mentioned. “It got so floppy that we couldn’t use it anymore.” Of course, having developed such a detailed bond with the mustache, she mentioned, watching it deteriorate wasn’t simple.

“I would feel so sad when the mustache was dying,” she mentioned. “Because the mustache had a life — and he’d had enough.”