“Masters of the Universe” team explains how they got He-Man’s look just right: ‘It doesn’t leave much to the imagination’

Key Points

• Masters of the Universe star Nicholas Galitzine and director Travis Knight explain which parts of He-Man’s costume were hardest to get right.

• Galitzine says one particular body part was the focus of a big discussion.

• Costume designer Richard Sale details how his team had to adjust based on Galitzine’s body transformation.

Nicholas Galitzine remembers exactly when he realized how much his body was transforming into the ripped, beefy He-Man for the new Masters of the Universe.

“I stick mainly to the right side of my bed, and when I’d come back from work in the evening, I would see the mattress elevated on the left side and it would divot to the right. I was like, Oh, wow, okay. That didn’t used to happen,” the British actor tells Entertainment Weekly, laughing. “But, of course, you don’t fit in any of your clothes anymore.”

Galitzine put in several months of work with various trainers; he eventually found his way to David Kingsbury — who’s worked with everyone from Hugh Jackman, Ryan Reynolds, and Chris Hemsworth — saying he “really took care of me.” In the process, he first bulked up (consuming thousands of calories daily), then cut fat (eating in a calorie deficit) to attain his eventual He-Man physique.

“My notion was that I wanted to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” he admits. But for this first movie, director Travis Knight didn’t want him to get “too big” and detract from the more meager Adam. Regardless, the Red, White & Royal Blue and The Idea of You star, who grew up playing sports, says he “learned a lot about myself and how far I was willing to push myself and really suffer for it…. It’s really not for the faint of heart. This is something that you need to do full-time for six months minimum. But I’m really happy [with the results].”

Throughout his training, the costume department was figuring out how He-Man would look, what he’d wear — and just how much skin he should show.

“It actually took a while to get to what that costume was going to look like because He-Man, famously, has that metal harness and those furry hot pants. And we did explore, Can we do that? I’m like, No, we can’t do that,” Knight recalls. So, they went the opposite direction — way more clothes, with what Knight calls the “Jim Morrison look,” with “tight leather trousers.”

“My favorite part of the He-Man look was him not wearing trousers,” says costume designer Richard Sale, laughing, “which was, I kid you not, on the cards for quite a long time.”

Ultimately, they landed on what could best be described as a gladiator skirt. “It’s more leather than fur, but still has a lot of the similar shape language and silhouette of the initial cartoon character and toy, but updated and a little bit more modern,” Knight says. “But it’s basically a guy running around in a sports bra and a mini skirt all day. And so it doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Nick is essentially half-naked all day long.”

There was also the chest piece to consider.

“Should he have a cross? What kind of cross should he have? Are we saying something with the cross?” Sale recalls of conversations around that aspect of the costume. “And you’re like, It’s not any particular cross, it’s just two intersecting lines at right angles. We’re not saying anything. We’ve made it as generic [as possible]…. But also just the fact that we managed to have that character showing that much flesh, I think it was a process that not everyone was on board with, but I’m so glad we got there with it because it’s so much part of that kind of look.”

In fact, a specific body part became a highly scrutinized topic.

“The nipples, actually, were a big point of conversation,” Galitzine reveals. “It would be this weird thing where I’d stand in the mirror with a couple of harnesses, and I felt like people were just staring at my nipples. We were like, Is it weird? Is it cool? Do we like it? And in the end, we thought that without nipples was probably the safest option.”

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Knight, Sale, and company had the look locked in for months before production began, but Sale’s team’s work wasn’t done; they had to keep making adjustments as Galitzine’s body took shape.

“We had to wait for Nick, and we had to keep revisiting Nick with it. Every three weeks, four weeks, we tried it on him again,” Sale says. “We had to make sure the chest armor was covering enough of his chest. As his pecs were developing, we had to keep adding bits more to it. And then for the process that he was going through of building up and then stripping down again, his waist would fluctuate. And props to him for doing that because for an actor to take that on board and to do it naturally — he wasn’t going to do it artificially, he was going to try and achieve it himself, which was such an amazing transition for an actor to do.”

The transformation wouldn’t be complete without hair and makeup.

“We definitely were not going to give him a page boy or the Dorothy Hamill ’80s cut that we all had in the ’80s — I had in the ’80s and that He-Man had in the ’80s,” Knight says. “But we wanted to do a cool, modern version of that. So when he goes from Adam to He-Man, it does look like he gets a little bit of a blowout. He gets a glow-up. Adam is a pasty attorney and fella. And then when he turns into He-Man, he’s bronze, he’s oiled, and he’s got a deep, deep tan. So body makeup was a part of it. Every time he would transform, he would have to get [the full works] so he looked like he was a bronze beach god.”

You can see Galitzine in his full He-Man transformation glory when Masters of the Universe hits theaters on June 5.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly