Mission: Impossible masks are more real than ever before

Jonna Mendez was paranoid the first time she donned a mask that looked like a real person. In the midst of a training exercise to test going undercover, the CIA’s former chief of disguise had chosen to stroll around Georgetown and impersonate a Black woman, wearing red stilettos and intricately-laced gloves to cover her extremities. But as she walked into a store, she couldn’t help but feel as though the woman behind the checkout counter was watching her. As she quickly exited, the intense humidity and rain began to fog up her sunglasses, trapping it as she waited until a team of surveillance officers picked her up. “It was a nightmare,” she says. “I had a worst-case scenario wearing that mask the very first time.”

It was much easier to wear it the second time. For George H.W. Bush the advances in the CIA’s mask technology, Mendez waited outside the Oval Office and nervously chewed her pencil in total disguise, this time masked as a female colleague. Upon entering with a group of men, including NSA advisor Brent Scowcroft and CIA director William H. Webster, Bush asked Mendez what she’d brought to show him. “I’m wearing it and I’ll take it off,” she said. After a brief inspection, the president gave up guessing what she was hiding, prompting Mendez to peel off her mask to the room’s delight. “It was definitely cool,” she says. “If you kept it on long enough, you’d forget you had it on.”

By the early 1990s, the CIA’s mask technology had far superseded Hollywood’s, allowing for spy work to occur within feet of unsuspecting targets and marks. Tom Cruise, a few years later, pulled off the exact same deceptive stunt, but this time, with the assistance of a visual effect team and several months of precisely calibrated prothetic work. The same as the Mission: Impossible television series, albeit without the need for obvious editing tricks, the three-decade-spanning spy movie franchise has made mask-wearing and revealing a staple part of its movies, using them at shocking moments and highlighting their technologically superior handiwork as the series has progressed. The practicality and ease of use have led to questions regarding its real-world application. Could someone unmistakably inhabit another person’s skin?

Answer: It’s complicated. In an age of digital surveillance and cyber subterfuge (which has now rendered much of Mendez’s disguise work obsolete), tangible disguises are even more dependent on the context of a mask’s use, someone’s facial structure, and the resources at one’s disposal. “In order for things to look plausible,” says Kevin Yagher Productions makeup artist Mitchell Coughlin, “it all comes down to studying the subtle movements.” In some ways, nobody will ever mimic the movie magic of using two actors, a mask, and VFX tricks to suggest a flawless silicone mug. In the past decade as technology and prosthetics have advanced, along with deepfake AI’s rise, the quality of masks has improved.

The evolution of spy masks

Paramount Pictures

John Chambers was consulted by the CIA before it began to make its own masks. The craftsman responsible for the design of Spock’s ears and the mask work on Planet of the ApesChambers has agreed to provide the agency with aluminum moulds, and to teach their members how to create stunt double masks. In the 1970s, the CIA didn’t rely on anything too specific — as long as a field agent looked right from a distance and didn’t move too much, the generic-looking masks could be helpful in specific operations. “He wasn’t trying to sell us ape masks; he was trying to be a good American citizen,” Mendez says.

Over the next decade, the agency’s disguise lab began working on its own enhancements, creating “semi-animated masks,” which fit over half of someone’s face to blend into the eyes or mouth. Artists contracted by the agency developed more elaborate masks that were breathable and removable. “The requirement for our mask was you had to be able to put it on in a parked car, in the dark, and because it was made just for you, it would register,” Mendez says. “You had to have the confidence to know that this thing would work. It was a tall order.” When Mendez took the masks to Chambers to show him their advances, Mendez says he was stunned at the craftsmanship. “[Hollywood’s] version of reality and our version of reality were quite separate,” she says. “We needed something that was going to protect people.”

Although the details are classified, the Mission: Impossible makeup artists have refined their skills to produce similar results. Despite their masks being supplemented with visual effects trickery, the franchise’s prosthetic artists have taken painstaking effort to get them as real as the actors they were meant to portray. The As Mission: Impossible 2Coughlin, a makeup supervisor describes the entire process. It can last up to several months. Later, silicone — the preferred material today — is poured through a tube that fills up the mask’s negative to create the skin. “There’s times when masks are great with foam rubber — it’s just opaque and you can’t really control the translucency,” Coughlin says. “It’s always great to have an intrinsically colored [silicone] that matches the actor.”

Digital trickery is then launched. It’s time to start the digital tricks. MI:2’s first-act plane sequence, for example, Dougray Scott’s villainous character wears Cruise’s face on a flight to secure a virus remedy, pulling off his mask once the passengers on board have passed out. The filmmakers, who used motion-controlled camera (which can repeat the same movement in multiple takes), made sure that Cruise and Scott were at the exact same spot on the aisle of the seats so that the VFX team would be able to overlay the two faces and sync the mask together. “The reveal was really the thing that our mask was the function for,” Coughlin says. “We made the masks with the eyes open, so it looked like a shell of Tom Cruise when it wasn’t on.”

Within the plot of subsequent movies, the process of mask application and making became increasingly prominent. In Mission: Impossible 3, a high-tech robotic scanner automatically spray-colors a silicone mask of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mug for Cruise to wear, while in Rogue NationBenji, the sidekick of the IMF team, explains to them how to wear a mask. This involves scanning his face digitally before the 3D printer creates the mask in a matter of seconds. These speedy gadgets may be fictional but a great deal of technology used in the franchise is based on techniques prostheticians use daily.

“Traditional sculpting and mold-making techniques are still very much in demand, but new digital solutions are becoming more affordable and effective,” says Christopher Goodman, a concept artist and 3D sculptor at Millennium FX. In the real world, he says, a 3D printer takes much longer than several seconds to print something, and can’t produce silicone or foam latex. It is still a good option for effect teams who are looking for precision. “3D scanning is extremely quick and reliable, digital modeling allows for great flexibility, and 3D printing can provide breathtaking detail,” he says. “Only recently I designed and created my first makeup entirely 3D-modeled and 3D-printed. Not a gram of sculpting clay was used.”

Becoming indistinguishable

Kevin Yagher productions

In 2019, researchers at the University of York and Kyoto University discovered that today’s silicone masks can fool the average person into believing that they’re real faces. The study involved British and Japanese participants looking at pairs of photographs and deciphering which face was actually a mask, and they got it wrong 20% of the time, even after psychologist Rob Jenkins admitted that researchers “showed them example masks before the test began.” Indeed, without side-by-side comparisons or recognizable faces, disguising yourself in public has become a somewhat easier game. In fact, today’s top silicone shops sell lifelike masks for $500–$700 on average. It’s no wonder why silicone masks have become a new tool for criminals.

Face deception in the digital world has advanced quickly as artificial intelligence is omnipresent. That was most evident a couple years ago when Miles Fisher went viral with his deepfake Tom Cruise videos, which showed Fisher impersonating the A-lister’s mannerisms with Cruise’s actual visage rendered over his face. The videos — simple addresses to the camera — looked so real that many TikTok and Instagram users assumed Cruise was creating them himself. Chris Ume was the visual effects expert and Metaphysic co-founder who made them. Fisher originally asked Ume for help in creating a parody clip of Cruise running as president. “It was a fun collaboration,” Ume says. “He called me up and said, ‘This was fun, let’s do more.’”

Like a sculptor taking molds, Ume started pulling as much footage of Cruise from movies and interviews as he could, dropping his data sets into a neural network that puzzled together his face onto someone else’s. Much of the work still needed Ume’s artistic touch, but it helped that Fisher has a voice, hair, and facial features that match those of Cruise. “Whenever you’re working with a body double, you should at least have some similarities. Because if I put Tom Cruise on my face it wouldn’t work in 100 years,” Ume says. “Miles’ eyebrows are very big compared to Cruise and that’s not ideal, but it’s just the way he has his hair and his attitude that helps a lot.” Of course, as Mendez says, the best disguises incorporate more than just appearance — especially with more surveillance and security measures in place. Everything — gait, posture, countenance — goes into deception.

There are nefarious use cases for this kind of innovation (see: pornography), an occupational hazard in Ume’s profession. But it’s easy to see deepfake technology impacting spycraft today and helping makeup artists build even more realistic synthetic masks — or replace them entirely.

“We could make a perfect replica of your face based on data when you were 10 years younger and we can use that as a reference for people working on prosthetic masks,” Ume says. At the moment, Metaphysic is in the midst of de-aging Tom Hanks for an upcoming Robert Zemeckis movie, using the company’s same deepfake technology to build real-time software that can scan and rewind Hanks’ face 30 years to make an imperceptible digital mask. “The goal we have is that when you watch the movie,” Ume says, “you won’t see a difference.”