How Did “Under the Skin” Find Adam Pearson, the Character with Facial Deformities?
According to casting director Kahleen Crawford, Under the Skin‘s director Jonathan Glazer never wanted to use prosthetics for the role of a man disfigured by neurofibromatosis. “It was important to [Glazer] for that person to be as real as everyone else.” Thus, Crawford contacted the charity Changing Faces, to let them know about what they were doing and about the integrity of the project, and they agreed very generously to give us a bit of their time in circulating information about it. So we made contact with a small pool of people, and then a smaller group of people who were even remotely interested in being on camera.” Most of the people who were contacted gruffly replied, “I’ve got a job, thank you, goodbye.”
However, Adam Pearson and a couple of other receptive individuals showed interest and had been on camera before. Pearson works in television production so “he was totally relaxed about it,” Crawford recalls, “He’d been on a show called Beauty and the Beast. So we met with him and we spoke with him at length about the scenes. We spent some time with Adam talking to him about the scene and what the character might talk about with Scarlett’s character - how might she lure him, what would grab his attention and that sort of thing. And he gave us some very honest answers and a lot of that is in the film.”