“I am churning out bodies left, right and centre.” These are the words of prosthetics and special effects expert Paul McGuinness, who has a niche talent for making very realistic dead bodies. If you’ve seen a corpse on TV or in a film recently, chances are McGuinness made it – his handiwork has appeared in the likes of Bad Sisters, Silent Witness, Wonder Woman, Justice League and SAS: Rogue Heroes.
“I’ve done so many, I’m known as the body man,” says Mr McGuinness, who started out at the BBC in the 80s, where he trained in pyrotechnics, doing everything from wind, rain and fire to massive explosions. “I was doing a Land Rover bomb scene on the first season of Silent Witness, and they asked if I could do some background dummies,” he recalls. “Fortunately, I’d always been interested in anatomy and physiology” – he studied it in night school aged 15 – “so knew how to make them realistic, and it kicked off from there.”
He’s worked on “basically anything that needs a corpse” since then, including a lot of the detective shows, doing some “pretty weird stuff”. For the Apple TV+ dark comedy series Bad Sisters, he had to create a chopped-up body, using latex and silicone, to fit in a suitcase, which was then dumped in a lake. “It was this rotted, semi-skeletal thing,” says Mr McGuinness.
Growing up in Scotland, Mr McGuinness was considered strange because he didn’t like football or other sports and would instead hide away in his bedroom sculpting things. “I’ve got pictures of me about seven years old with big gashes on my face that I’d created, and rubber spiders everywhere,” he laughs.
In the early stages of his career, he even played monsters and aliens in Red Dwarf and Doctor Who, thanks to his 6ft 5in height, and because he was sculpting the characters anyway. For one of his first body jobs he created a mould of himself on an autopsy table for the series Degrees of Error.
“Back then, we used different materials,” he says. “Dummies were originally made out of gelatine with a polyurethane foam core. There was no water involved. It was all made out of syrups – glycerol, sorbitol and gelatine powder, and it was boiled up. It was quite strong, but heat sensitive and could easily melt, so you had to be careful. The BBC wouldn’t spend money on silicone, so we used this stuff called vinyl moulds, which was really toxic.”
Then in 2001, he worked on a TV film called Impact, starring Hugh Bonneville, about an explosion of a plane over rural England. “We had a 757 plane on fire in a field, bodies everywhere and helicopters circling over us.”
The film never got a worldwide release because 9/11 happened shortly after it was filmed, but the experience allowed Mr McGuinness to experiment with a new silicone, which he still uses, that was flesh-like and durable. “It was raining and we had the plane on fire, so there was no way we could have the bodies made of gelatine, because if they get wet they go slimy, and if they’re hot, they melt. So the silicone bodies were perfect and looked really realistic.”
He doesn’t just do humans either. For Wonder Woman, he created and cast dead horses for a battle scene, getting every little detail right. For the sequel, he created a horse ridden by a 10-year-old Wonder Woman, which was rigged onto the back of a truck and had to move and buck, while going along a cliff face.
Mr McGuinness has become so in-demand that a few years ago set up his own company Corpse Hire, because “I was being constantly asked on a Friday evening: ‘Can you get us a woman with her face chopped off or hands removed within a few days.’” When he first started out, “we’d get a yellow requisition form months in advance with detailed requirements. Now the industry’s gone to the dogs and it’s huge tasks with quick turnarounds.” Hence churning out the corpses.
Sometimes the requests can be dangerous or suspicious. “I was approached by Al Jazeera once, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was about,” explains Mr McGuinness. “They just said, ‘We need a dummy of a child. We’ll send you some pictures.’ They didn’t have a lot of money, so when I told them how much it would cost, they said, ‘Would it be cheaper if the dummy didn’t have legs?’ I said yes. Then it went quiet. Six months later they came back and said, ‘Right we’re doing it now.’ It turned out it was for a documentary in Ghana with an investigative journalist looking into ‘spirit children’ who are sacrificed. This journalist did a sting and replaced a real child with my dummy at the last minute. It led to the spiritual gang being arrested, so that was a good job.”
Other recent requests include creating stand-in bodies for the series Slow Horses, for when someone is unconscious or motionless, and he’s done the same for the vampire horror comedy film The Radleys, where he created replicas of Damian Lewis when his character is being dragged around.
“That was also the case for A Gentleman In Moscow, where Ewan McGregor’s character had to carry a young girl to hospital, so we created a lighter, realistic dummy. And we did a load of dummies of dead bodies for SAS: Rogue Heroes because you don’t have to feed them, or make sure they’re hydrated in the desert. They’re just in the background.”
For superhero film The Suicide Squad, he made exact replicas of Flash (Ezra Miller) and his girlfriend, and the 50s Oldsmobile car she’s travelling in as it crashes into a truck and flips over.. “The car was made from a silicone mould and then casts of carbon fibre, so it was lightweight,” he explains. “We then attached them to an articulated lorry on a track using a robot arm. The actress playing the girlfriend was in Los Angeles so they sent me a scan of her head, which I did a mould of and then had it printed.”
He did something similar with actress Rebecca Ferguson recently for the Apple TV+ sci-fi series Silo. “They sent me a scan, but it was a rubbish version of her. So I took a mould of it, cast it out, waxed it and then completely remodelled it to make it look like her with pores and all that kind of stuff.”
Mr McGuinness is now so busy that he’s recruited his sons to help out. His eldest posts videos on Tik Tok of them creating bodies, which have had over 300 million views in the past year. “Lots of people comment on them, including pathologists, one of whom reposted the video of the body in the suitcase for Bad Sisters as a demonstration video, saying, ‘This is this and that is that’. No, it’s a piece of latex and silicon.”
He chuckles. “It’s all completely bonkers, but I love it.”
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