Watch ‘The Dirt’ Actor Transform Into Tommy Lee In 39 Incredible Seconds
(L) Machine Gun Kelly / Facebook, (R) @machinegunkelly / Twitter
The Dirt Star Shares Incredible Transformation Into Tommy Lee
Mötley Crüe’s biopic The Dirt was released two weeks ago to great fanfare, fans and critics alike hailing the brilliant adaptation of the 2001 book about the band’s wild and tragic history as the bad boys of Los Angeles. A serious amount of blood, sweat, and tears went into bringing their story to life, but as with any good biopic, it began with finding actors capable of taking on a legacy as big as Mötley Crüe.
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Rapper Machine Gun Kelly was tapped to play drummer Tommy Lee, and as far as we’re concerned Jeff Tremaine made the most perfect choice possible in casting him; credited as Colson Baker, he embodied Tommy Lee’s energy and attitude so flawlessly that for a second, we had to do a double take to make sure it wasn’t actually Tommy on the screen.
That, of course, was due in no small part to the incredible makeup team that got him ready to film each day for four months straight, spending hours upon hours doing everything from covering tattoos to fitting wigs and costumes to ensure that the Tommy Lee you saw in The Dirt was as close to the real life Tommy as possible.
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The transformation from tattooed, bleached blond rapper into the long haired, baby faced Lee was a lengthy one, with two layers of airbrushing required to cover Baker’s tattoos. The process was even longer, he revealed in a 39-second time lapse video posted to Twitter, when it came time to recreate Tommy Lee’s own tattoos. We don’t even want to know how many hours it took to put everything on, and we want to know even less how many hours it took to take everything off at the end of the day!
In the end, Colson Baker looked incredible as Tommy Lee and delivered a performance so real and so believable, that it’s hard to remember that it was only an actor. If you were blown away, just imagine how excited – and a little freaked out – Tommy must have been when he saw Colson for the first time!
The Transformation
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(Xanax)
