How Alexander Skarsgård became a splinter-free wicker husband for Olivia Colman in Wicker

The most distracting question around Wicker may be the simplest one. If Alexander Skarsgård is playing a man made of woven basketry, how does Olivia Colman get through the film’s intimate scenes without coming away covered in splinters? The answer has almost nothing to do with straw and a lot to do with prosthetics, spandex and a surprisingly technical build that turned a fantasy character into something the camera could believe.

The part everyone noticed was not actually wicker

Wicker, which is now in theaters, gives Colman the role of a spinster fisherwoman living in a medieval community where a woman’s worth is tied to marriage. Her character is independent and makes her own living, but the village taunts her as she goes about her work. She eventually visits the local basket weaver, played by Peter Dinklage, and asks him to make her a husband out of wicker.

That request produces one of the film’s biggest visual hooks. Skarsgård, hidden under practical effects and prosthetic makeup, appears as a woven man rather than a conventional human romantic lead. It also creates the obvious practical problem. If the character looks like a giant basket, what happens when the film asks Colman to get close to him in the movie’s steamy scenes?

The solution was deceptively simple. The surface that looks like wicker was not made from straw at all. Most of Skarsgård’s costume was built from 50 separate 3D printed pieces. Those pieces were painted to resemble woven basket material and then stitched onto a soft, flexible spandex suit. The result looked rough enough for the screen, but the underlying build was designed so there would be no actual splinter hazard.

According to prosthetic makeup designer Joe Dunckley, the finished material had some of the feel of real wicker while remaining semi-flexible. That meant the costume could sell the illusion without behaving like the real thing.

A basket man built like a visual effects problem, only practical

The team behind the character did not treat the job like ordinary prosthetic makeup. Dunckley and lead makeup FX artist Sarah Rubano, both working with Weta Workshop artists, were brought in after writers and directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson adapted Ursula Wills’ short story The Wicker Husband. They were told that the goal was to make the character practically.

That choice created a huge challenge from the start. Standard prosthetic materials are made to imitate skin and flesh. This character was supposed to look like woven plant material while still seeming alive. Dunckley said the team spent 18 months on research and development alone, trying to figure out how to make the weave feel believable as part of a living body.

Their idea was not just to create a static basket texture. They wanted each strand of the weave to read as an individual element, moving in a way that could suggest something like muscle fibers under the surface. If that worked, the audience could accept the character as a sentient wicker being rather than a man trapped under a rigid shell.

The trouble was that they could not simply mold the effect in the normal way. That pushed the build toward newer digital tools. The team started with a full body scan of Skarsgård so every section could be sculpted specifically for him. From there, they used 3D digital sculpting and 3D printing to create the basket-like surface.

The weave itself came from a relatively new powder-bed laser sintered printing method. In practical terms, the costume was built inside a bed of thermoplastic elastomer powder. A laser fused the material at precise points, allowing the makers to create very intricate strands and complex geometry while the surrounding powder held the forms apart as they set. For a costume that needed to look woven rather than flat, that level of detail mattered.

The trick was making sure you could still see Skarsgård

A practical creature build can easily swallow the performer inside it, and the team was trying to avoid exactly that. However strange the concept was, they still needed the audience to recognize that there was a person inside the weave.

Rubano’s part of the process involved 10 separate prosthetic makeup pieces. Skarsgård would put on a tightly fitted suit, then move back and forth between the costume process and the makeup chair depending on what stage they were at. The facial build included ears, eye bags and lips, plus an underlip piece, a jaw piece and larger appliances covering the forehead, nose and cheekbones. There was also extensive hand painting around the eyes.

His facial hair needed its own solution. The beard, hair and eyelashes were made from muka, a silky soft fiber taken from the harakeke plant. Because those strands could be knotted directly onto the woven surface, the team could trim and style them more like real hair.

Dunckley said they also used 3D animation software to preserve Skarsgård’s expressive range. By tracking how his face moved, they could design the weave so it allowed for expressions rather than freezing him into one look. That was central to the whole build. If the audience lost the actor completely, the character risked turning into a visual gimmick instead of a performance.

Even with all of that detail, the transformation did not become an all-day ordeal. By the end of the process, Rubano said they had the timing down to about 90 minutes, which kept the full changeover under two hours.

One issue kept coming back, and it had nothing to do with splinters

For all the technical problem solving, one of the biggest day-to-day obstacles was much more ordinary. Heat.

Rubano said Skarsgård runs hot, the suit itself was hot, and production was dealing with a hot Hungarian spring. That meant the challenge was not whether the costume could be built, but whether it could be worn comfortably enough to keep performing inside it.

The people making the suit also made clear that the actor’s attitude helped keep the whole thing workable. Dunckley described Skarsgård as a strong collaborator who stayed invested in the process, brought humor to it and could sit very still in the chair while the team worked. On a build this involved, patience was not a bonus. It was part of what made the effect possible.

That matters because Wicker was not chasing a quick illusion for one shot. The costume had to hold up in performance, in close-up and in scenes where the physical reality of the character was the whole point. A practical effect can only succeed if the actor inside it can live in it long enough for the audience to stop thinking about how it was made.

Yes, they also had to answer the wicker ween question

Then there was the detail people were always going to ask about once the film’s premise became public. If the husband is wicker, what exactly does that mean for every part of him?

Dunckley acknowledged there had been plenty of speculation about how the mechanics of a wicker penis would work and whether it might be dangerous. His answer leaned into the logic of the story. In his view, Dinklage’s basket maker is an expert craftsman, someone who has traveled widely and learned how to weave from many cultures, so he would know how to make one that was usable.

Rubano pointed to the film’s costume designers, András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász, for the final build of that piece. They created it for a full body river shot. She said the work came together very late, but it was made from puff spandex with a 3D weave that gave it dimension, and from a distance it was matched convincingly to the rest of the costume.

That final detail says a lot about the entire Wicker effect. The film’s strangest visual idea was not left to suggestion or handled with a digital shortcut. It was designed, fitted, painted, attached and performed. The reason Colman was not dealing with splinters was not movie magic in the vague sense. It was a carefully engineered illusion built piece by piece, right down to the parts viewers were always going to ask about.