If you have been acquainted with the Bloaters in the Last of Us game, you would know how difficult they are to take down. The fourth and rarest stage of the infected specimen officially made its premiere in the Last of Us TV show running on HBO and it was nothing short of glorious.
Episode 5 of The Last of Us saw the creature emerge from an underground tunnel to horrifying effect. Now, the four-time Emmy-winner prosthetics designer Barrie Gower explains how he brought it to life.
During a recent sit down with Variety, Barrie Gower, the man responsible for the full-body prosthetics for Stranger Things' Vecna and many other terrifying creatures that earned him four Emmys over the course of his career, gave a detailed explanation of how this version of the Bloater came to be. We had a whole copy of his body that we modeled the bloater prosthetics over in modeling clay. We cast it out of a foam rubber and foam latex, which is very lightweight. It’s almost like an upholstery foam, a very spongy sort of material. That was all molded and cast in separate sections: top half, head, arms, legs. We had a team who fabricated all these parts together. We had a zipper up the back and around the waist that we could zip them together. He had all these pendulous folds of fungus which hid zippers and poppers." Adam Basil, a 6 '6'' British stunt person, was the person deemed worthy of carrying this suit that weighs an astonishing 40 kilos (88 pounds). This was a great challenge for everyone involved, with an additional 15 other stunt performers dressed as Clickers, and another 50+ acting as infected. The team preparing the outlooks for the team of 65 prosthetic artists reportedly spent five hours getting the horde scene camera-ready.