Movies - TV
How Orphan: First Kill Made Isabelle Fuhrman Look 12 Years Old Again
By BJ COLANGELO
Spoiler Warning!
This story contains spoilers for the 2009 horror film "Orphan."
Now in her 20s, Isabelle Fuhrman is back to playing the killer ‘9-year-old’ Esther in “Orphan: First Kill,” a feat that surprisingly wasn’t achieved with CGI. Director William Brent Bell explained that Fuhrman “looked so similar” to when she was 12 that sizing up her wardrobe and using camera perspective-tricks was all it took for her to convincingly play a child.
Bell explained how things like the size of Fuhrman’s fork or placing her co-stars on a platform led to the forced visual perspective of her appearing as a child. Fuhrman also explained that her childlike appearance was achieved without makeup, calling it “creepy,” and said that now the hard part of the role was playing the child aspect of the character, a reverse of how things were in 2009’s “Orphan.”
The disturbing sequence in the original “Orphan” where Esther takes off her makeup to reveal the face of an older woman was brought to life using custom-made prosthetics and fake-injury makeup, which took about five hours to apply. In 2019, Fuhrman revealed that after experimenting with lots of wigs, fake teeth, and haircuts, they decided to keep her eyes and hair as they were.