Plastic Surgery With a Mouse Click! The Biggest Cheats in Show Biz

Whether it's software shaving years off an actor's life or an onstage Teleprompter for singers, entertainers are taking deception to unprecedented new levels. 

- Logan Hill

Recently, after shooting three episodes of the WGN America drama Salem, an actor in a prominent role left the show for personal reasons. A few years ago, such a major switch would have been a costly debacle requiring expensive reshoots. But “we didn’t have to reshoot at all,” says veteran showrunner Brannon Braga. “We’re replacing his face with a new actor’s face.”

Today, digital face replacement is just one technique at Hollywood’s disposal. Braga regularly uses CG to retouch actors, “whether it’s a pimple, or an actress who has bags under her eyes on that particular day, or painting out a nipple in a sex scene.” When an actress got a nose ring without telling him, his post production team removed it at a cost of “tens of thousands of dollars.” Such work can get expensive, but it’s industry standard. “Look, we recreated the whole Library of Alexandria,” he says, referring to his work on the Neil deGrasse Tyson documentary series Cosmos. “Why wouldn’t we get rid of a cookie crumb on Neil’s mustache?” But Braga is no trailblazer. “I do television,” he says, “not $300 million movies.”

He’s just using digital techniques that have become ubiquitous over the last decade—even though they are largely invisible to most audiences, rarely discussed by creators, and usually hidden behind nondisclosure agreements. “Every time you think of visual effects, you think of an explosion or a giant robot,” says Vince Cirelli, a VFX supervisor at Luma Pictures, a firm that’s worked on everything from No Country for Old Men to