SUBMITTED BY Typhon24

May 7, 2003 —

From CountingDown's exclusive interview with X2 Production Designer Guy Dyas:

For Nightcrawler, we started out with a very demonic interpretation. I love the way Adam Kubert draws the X-Men and to me, his design of Nightcrawler was the right direction to go for his big screen debut. Adam's drawings show him both as very charismatic and extremely agile. Then of course the casting of Nightcrawler played a big part in his design. When Bryan cast Alan Cumming we were able to weave in a lot of additional characteristics. For example, Alan made Nightcrawler a lot more mischievous, which I think plays well into the rest of the X-Men, Alan is also very graceful which fits in perfectly with Nightcrawler's past as a circus performer... We then did some concept sketches for the special effects make-up department, specifically Nightcrawler's face, hands, feet and tail. I guess that the biggest challenge with Nightcrawler was the fact that we were adding a new character with blue skin and we wanted to make him stand apart from Mystique. In the comics it works well when several characters have similar characteristics but in the film, we felt we needed more differentiation. We did tests for Nightcrawler with several shades of blue, finally choosing the midnight blue seen in the film. The blue make-up foundation used by the make-up department was a very complicated process and ended up involving several layers of black and blue so as to accentuate Nightcrawler's facial features. We even added some metallic into the blue for added dimension. The scars on Nightcrawler's face and body are something new and the idea was actually introduced by our writers Dan Harris and Mike Dougherty.

Hit the link below for more from Dyas, including some info on what was cut from X2 (like a fight between Toad and Nightcrawler) that we can still x-pect in X3 (like the Sentinels, Beast, and the Danger Room)!