'Anna Nicole' star on her transformation: 'It took an army'

Last week, costume designer Deborah Everton gave us a peek inside the sexy wardrobe for the explosive new Lifetime movie Anna Nicole. Now, star Agnes Bruckner is letting us in on what it was like to step into the Guess model’s falsies.

“The physical transformation was unbelievable,” Bruckner told reporters during a conference call about the project. “It definitely [took] a team of people. … We had cheek prosthetics, neck prosthetics. There was a fat suit. There were so many different looks that she had [over the course of her life]. We probably changed my look three or four times a day on set, which was really crazy.”

Of course, there were also those prosthetic breasts, which were created by a special-effects team. The actress estimates that the daily process took an hour and a half each day, with the exception of day one, which took around three hours to get things just right.

How did Bruckner handle her new assets? “With a lot of glue!” she laughed. “We came up with what size we wanted the boobs to be. We didn’t want them to be ridiculously large because we wanted people to focus on the story more than just focusing on her boobs.”

Everton recently echoed the sentiment, telling EW.com, “I think everybody on the team agreed, ‘Let’s not go there because it would be too distracting.’ Still, in a way, they had to be their own little mini-character.” To reduce time, the wardrobe team was tasked with finding padded garments, so they wouldn’t be dependent on those prosthetics. “I would say 80 percent of the time, the breasts were built up in my department — with padded bras and chicken cutlets.”

The actress also wore fake eyelashes, while her hair was, mostly, all her own. “I bleached my own hair, but we had pieces woven in and different wigs for the more Marilyn Monroe look,” she said. “It took an army. It’s not easy to make somebody look like that every day and keep switching the look up too.” The hair and makeup team relished the challenge. “It was everybody’s dream character!”

Anna Nicole premieres Saturday on Lifetime at 8 p.m.

–Reporting by Lanford Beard