Chris Owens in The X-FILES Official Magazine #7

[Chris Owens in Nazi uniform]

Chris Owens and Chris Carter in the "Ghost Ship" episode.


The X-FILES Official Magazine comes with several different covers: one for newstands, one for collectors (sold at comic book shops), and one for members of the Official X-FILES Fan Club. The collector's edition of issue number seven features Chris Owens on the cover - as Mutato. There are more Mutato pictures inside, as well as one of Chris in Nazi uniform. There's also an article about the Mutato makeup:

MONSTER MASH

Although a normal day at the office for special effects artist Toby Lindala might include anything from creating convicing looking tree-people to crafting silicone masks for faceless alien firemen, the work he was required to do to transform actor Chris Owens, better known as Agent Jeffrey Spender, into the Great Mutato for "Post Modern Prometheus" still qualified as a tall order.

"Chris [Carter] and I started talking about this episode really early in the season, and we had the design about two months before the episode [began shooting]," Lindala remembers. "It was an exciting project because I was paying homage to a lot of people [and films that are] the reasons I'm involved in this work - Frankenstein, The Fly. We took a bunch of stuff -from a show called The Funhouse, that had some wonderful work by [Academy Award-winning special effects artist and creature creator] Rick Baker - early, early stuff," he says.

As novel as the prospect of creating a monster might have been, the process teetered on laborious. It took between three to four hours to prepare Owens for the camera."There were seven different [application] pieces-," Lindala explains. "One went over the inner skull, the second head, there were six other pieces that were made to overlap."

The magic worked. Owens, unrecognizable beneath the prosthetics, was entirely believable as the misunderstood monstrosity roaming the cornfields of rural Indiana.

"Chris [Owens] is a talented guy, probably the most talented during complete encasement in foam latex that I've seen," Lindala jokes.



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