RATED DD: Agnes Bruckner donned false boobs to portray Anna Nicole Smith (inset). (
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It’s the ultimate bust-out role.
Portraying tragic bombshell Anna Nicole Smith in the Lifetime biopic “Anna Nicole,” airing June 29, actress Agnes Bruckner goes from a B-cup to a DD — with absolutely no surgery involved.
Her secret? State-of-the-art prosthetics designed by three-time Academy Award winner Greg Cannom (“Mrs. Doubtfire,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) and painstakingly applied by experienced makeup artists Todd McIntosh and David De Leon.
“David and I would apply the breasts in tandem,” McIntosh said of the miracle falsies, made of gel-filled silicone and designed to be applied individually.
“This created the freedom for them to move and jiggle more like flesh,” he explained. “It would have been impossible for her to do the pole dancing or fill out some of the outfits without this innovation.”
And fill them out she does. As Anna Nicole, Bruckner gyrates at a strip club, preens and poses for Playboy, dances wildly on a table in the skimpiest of dresses and even dives into a pool. Yet the faux DDs never give themselves away.
For Bruckner, who has described herself as “flat-chested,” wearing the prosthetics was certainly an uplifting — but bizarre — experience.
“They couldn’t have been any more real looking,” she said. “It was so strange, wearing them for the first time. I was standing there ‘topless,’ but it was really like I had a shirt on because there was nothing exposed of my own. I’d look at myself, and I kept thinking, ‘Oh, my God, could you imagine if they really were that big?’ ”
But heavy is the heart that wears the breasts.
While McIntosh said the silicone “warms up so that the prosthetics get quite comfortable,” putting them on every day was an ordeal, with Bruckner enduring three-hour-long fittings so the makeup team could get them looking just right.
“She was a trouper in all capital letters,” McIntosh said.
Of course, it took a lot more than prosthetics to bring Anna Nicole back to life.
“There’s so much hair, so much makeup, fake eyelashes,” Bruckner said. “I’ve never done this before, even in my personal life. But it was so much of who she was.”
Bruckner’s makeup routine “took us four hours with three people,” McIntosh recalled. “The morning started with David doing the beauty look while I prepped the prosthetics. Then David and I would apply the breasts, positioning, blending, then laying in colors. During that process, our third makeup artist, Amber Crowe, would begin the process of covering Agnes’ eight tattoos.”
“Then we would mix and match jobs to finish up,” he said. “I’d work on tattoos, and David would repair the beauty makeup that had been on for hours already.”
All the hard work paid off: Bruckner’s resemblance to Smith is uncanny.
De Leon says it was the tabloid goddess’ love of the camera that made it possible to take the trip down mammary lane.
“I literally had hundreds of photos of Anna Nicole on my iPad that we could reference at any time,” he explained, adding he and McIntosh recreated Smith’s many looks — from young single mom to voluptuous supermodel to pill-popping, yo-yo-dieting Hollywood casualty — all based on those photos.
“We got to do everything,” De Leon said. “It’s really a wonderful opportunity for a makeup artist.”