How “Wicker”’s special effects team turned Alexander Skarsgård into a sexy man-basket

Mike MillerTue, October 13, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC

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Alexander Skarsgård on the set of ‘Wicker’Credit: Black BearKey points -

Alexander Skarsgård plays a man made of weave in the upcoming fairy-tale comedy, Wicker.

Prosthetic and makeup artists from the award-winning Wētā Workshop explain how they created the look.

The costume comprised 50 interlocking parts and was developed with never-before-used technology.

How do you make a sexy basket?

If anyone could, it’s the wizards at Wētā Workshop, the award-winning special effects company hired to design the woven heartthrob at the center of Wicker, the upcoming rom-com fairy tale from writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson.

Those who have seen the trailer — and the many thirsty memes it’s inspired — already know they pulled it off. “The unfolding has been so, so fun,” lead makeup effects artist Sarah Rubano (Avatar: Fire and Ash, M3GAN 2.0) tells Entertainment Weekly of the online response.

Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård in ‘Wicker’Credit: Black Bear Pictures

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in anything I’ve ever worked on,” adds prosthetic makeup designer Joe Dunckley (Avatar: Fire and Ash, Alien: Earth). “Some people are just taking it as a humorous thing and looking sideways at their patio furniture, and other people are getting right into the nitty-gritty of what relationships mean.”

Adapted from the short story “The Wicker Husband” by Ursula Wills, the film follows the Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman), a perpetually single outcast who contracts the Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) to weave her the perfect spouse (Alexander Skarsgård).

The real basketmakers at Wētā, including Dunckley and Rubano, spent 18 months bringing the almost entirely practical costume to life. The challenges fell into “two baskets,” Dunckley quips. “One was the aesthetic,” he explains. “He’s the romantic lead, so he needed to be the object of desire. It needed to be believable that the fisherwoman falls in love with him.”

The other, he says, was finding “a way to get the weave to move so that Alexander could express [himself].”

They started by creating a digital scan of the actor’s body and wove the costume together using computer software. “We did attempt weaving various materials in our [research and development] process, but what we settled on was a 3D model,” Dunckley reveals.

“We 3D printed the prosthetics themselves in a print material with the weave intact. We think it’s the first time this has been done,” he explains. “We have, and other shops have, done digital prosthetics before, but you usually do a mold. We didn’t do a mold for this, and we think that’s a first. And then it’s polished and painted to look like wicker.”

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Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård in ‘Wicker’Credit: Black Bear Pictures

Then “each individual strand” of the costume was painted with different colors. “You had to follow it through the whole pattern, because that’s one of the things that’s intrinsic in basketry,” he adds. “Every strand is slightly different.”

The final result was composed of 50 interlocking parts. “For the body, all the pieces were stitched onto a spandex suit, so that eventually became one piece made up of many pieces,” Rubano says. “The face had about 13 individual pieces. And that’s including the wig and the eyelashes. But the ears were separate, the lips were separate, the eye bags were separate, and there was a chin piece and a lower under-lip piece, so it kind of puzzle-pieced together.”

The most challenging part of assembling the costume “was just making sure that our weaves were all lined up,” she adds. “So as we were putting the lower lip on, we had to match the weave and make sure the strands were all lined up perfectly.”

Alexander Skarsgård and Olivia Colman in ‘Wicker’Credit: Black Bear Pictures

For the Wicker Husband’s hair, Dunkley says they relied on “organic materials, real weaving, and ancient craft.” Skarsgård’s wig “was muka, which is made from harakeke, which is New Zealand flax,” he says. “It’s shredded and teased into a fine fiber. Then that’s all dyed into various colors and hand-tied, individual strands, onto the weave itself.”

Despite all the intricate details, they managed to get the actor in costume in under two hours each day. Both designers credit Skarsgård with making the process painless. “Alexander was not only 100 percent in, but he was funny; he kept things light, he sat as still as a statue,” Rubano says. “He was so kind and such a great teammate.”

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Coming straight from another project, Skarsgård first tried on the outfit and prosthetics just three days before filming started. “It was scary leading up to that,” Rubano admits. “We were fairly confident, because the pieces were made for him…but until you do that final test, there’s a lot of butterflies and nerves.”

Fortunately, when he finally put it on, Dunckley says, “It fit him like a glove.”

Wicker opens in limited release on Oct. 23 and expands wide the following week.

on Entertainment Weekly

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