For Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the team whittled the process down to four hours. "We made progress," Saldana told Metro U.K. "The first movie was five and we shaved off an hour!" Later, as the actress revealed on Twitter, the team had gotten everything down to about three hours.
Needless to say, the procedure can be exhausting—and boring.
"It gets harder, 'cause you're tired. It's like Groundhog Day; you're living the same day over and over. You're like, 'When is this going to stop? How many more makeup days do we have?" Saldana told Hollywood Outbreak in 2017. "There's a great deal of tantrums that go by, so I appreciate the fact that my team always protects me. But as soon as I get to set, I forget it all."
With five films done (including this year's Avengers: Endgame), things have gotten easier. Gamora's original prosthetic design "consisted of a silicone forehead, and right and left silicone cheek pieces," Brian Sipe, department head of makeup for Legacy Effects, blogged in 2017. "Zoe was not a fan of having 'all of this alcohol-based make-up sprayed all over her face,' so the search was on to find something more skin-friendly." After a series of tests, the team brought in Steimberg, Saldana's personal makeup artist. "When it came to redesigning her coloration, we knew we needed to involve her right away," Sipe explained. "We poured through the continuity and application notebooks from the first film to see what we could change and streamline."
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