YOU saw John Hurt’s Proteus syndrome in 1980’s “The Elephant Man,” Eric Stoltz’s craniodiaphyseal dysplasia in 1985’s “Mask” and Mel Gibson’s severe facial scarring in 1993’s “The Man Without a Face.”
Now it’s time to check out Robert Downey Jr. as a cranky mystery writer with extreme psoriasis in “The Singing Detective,” opening Friday.
It’s not easy to look at Downey, so crippled by the disease his hands have fused into claws.
Downey’s character calls himself a “human pizza,” while his wife, played by Robin Wright Penn, dubs his psoriasis a “disgusting disease.”
The makeup he wears is so graphic, one well-known movie critic walked out of a Midtown screening yesterday, saying, “I’m going outside to throw up.”
But the movie is worth one or two queasy moments, not only for its quirky humor, which will remind many of “Adaptation,” but especially for Downey’s buzz-worthy performance.
And it shines a light on a common but rarely discussed illness, extreme psoriasis, which affects more than 5 million Americans – including John Updike, Art Garfunkel, Jerry Mathers and Kenneth Starr – making them, as Downey’s character says, “a prisoner inside their own skin.”
“The Singing Detective” is based on a British TV series written by Dennis Potter, a celebrated English screenwriter who suffered from extreme psoriasis.
Like Downey’s character, Potter would be able to live a relatively normal life – until his psoriasis would flare up and engulf his whole body, sending him to the hospital for months, where the doctors would relieve his pain with strong drugs that caused hallucinations, and frequent rubdowns with a gloopy Vaseline-type grease.
Often the attacks were brought on by stress.
“It’s such a horrifying irony,” says Keith Gordon, who directed “Detective.”
“Here’s this terrible disease that shows on your face and skin, making you look like this sort of monster that everyone stares at – and then the doctor says, ‘Now, don’t get stressed!’ “
Potter was fearless in depicting his disease, and Gordon didn’t flinch either.
“We had to look at hundreds of medical photos to get the makeup right,” he recalls. “Sometimes you’d feel like crying for these people, but then you’re also looking at it artistically, like ‘This one where he’s bleeding all over is pretty interesting.’ “
Downey had to endure weeks of testing as the makeup artists searched for just the right mix of silicone and paint for his skin.
“One version looked too plastic and another kept falling off,” Gordon recalls. “We finally found another one that looked great. But when we took it off, Robert’s skin had turned all swollen and blotchy.”
Once the makeup people got the kinks worked out, it took four hours a day to apply, and it was like acting in a hairshirt.
“Robert was not Mr. Happy Guy when he was in the makeup,” Gordon says, “but instead of yelling at the crew, he used that to help him get into the character’s rage and discomfort.”
Downey even came to crave it, and during rehearsals, he wrapped himself in Saran Wrap to get that same hot and itchy feeling.
Of course, none of that is as hard as actually living with psoriasis, as Gordon and Downey were often reminded when looking at Potter’s original script.
He wrote it by hand, using a plastic pencil holder taped to his frozen fingers.
In the margin of one page, Potter wrote a note to his daughter, who was typing the pages.
“Sorry, Sarah,” he wrote. “Grease, etc., makes it harder to hold the pen.”
“I always found that so moving,” Gordon says. “It was like, my God, this really happens to people.”
‘Finally, a film about us!’
WORD about “The Singing Detective” is just reaching the mainstream, but it’s been a hot topic for months among psoriasis sufferers.
“Our message boards have been buzzing,” says Mike Paranzino, spokesman for the National Psoriasis Foundation. “Our members are happy to finally have psoriasis in a movie where it’s not the punch line, like in ‘Shallow Hal.’ “
The group even had a contest to win tickets to the Oct. 9 premiere in Manhattan, won by a Texas psoriasis sufferer and his wife.
Members can now enter a contest on psoriasis.org, to win the complete “Singing Detective” BBC series on video.
“The original series is revered in some circles,” Paranzino says. “Dennis Potter was someone who really understood what patients with severe psoriasis go through.”