One Total Recall Prop Was So Real, It Even Fooled Director Paul Verhoeven

The bread and butter of Paul Verhoeven's classic blockbuster, "Total Recall," has to be its practical effects. In fact, one of the prosthetics was so uncanny and realistic (at least in the footage) that Verhoeven thought it was one of his actors who had gone rogue and shot the scene without his involvement or permission. However, the truth was that prosthetic and makeup artist Rob Bottin had made a complete robot resembling Marshall Bell (who played mutant human George/Kuato) just so he could prove to the director that the vision he had dreamt up for the scene could be done the way he envisioned it without looking fake.

In a retrospective interview with Syfy, actor Mel Johnson Jr., who played the sneaky mutant spy Benny, recalled how Bottin fooled Verhoeven in a brilliant way. It had to do with one of the most memorable scenes, in which Kuato, a psychic mutant, is revealed to be a conjoined twin to George and the leader of Mars' Resistance. As Johnson said, "Even in today's terms you would have thought it was like a CGI thing, but Kuato was real. Kuato was like a physical thing. So all those movements were physical. Kuato, in order to work had to be a robot [not Marshall Bell] to get the mechanics for Kuato to work. And Paul really didn't want that."

Initially, Verhoeven said no, thinking it wouldn't look right. So Bottin shot some footage in secret to show the director. As Johnson explained, "Paul went, 'How did Marshall do this? Who told Marshall to do this scene without me?' Rob said, 'Uh-uh, that's not Marshall, that's my robot. I did it just so you could see, just from your reaction, that you didn't know that's not Marshall.'"

As a special make-up designer and creator, Bottin worked on some of the most iconic '80s and '90s movies whose practical effects still hold up magnificently today. Besides "Total Recall," he left his imprint on such classics as the original "The Thing," "Mission: Impossible," "Seven," and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," among others.

Mel Johnson Jr. had the privilege of working with him on several occasions and brought up the scene where Benny reveals his identity with his mutated "long-arm" appendage as a moment in which Bottin's work proved inventive and inspiring. "For him to do my arm, I had to be in a complete half-body cast from my waist up to my neck, and I had never broken a limb or anything, so I was never in a cast before. I had to learn how to do body acting with my arm because there were like seven guys behind me moving that electronically when they took it off. And I just loved it. I thought it was great."

Bottin's contribution was immense in virtually everything he was involved in over the past four decades. This is why it's such a shame that he retired around 2002 after VFX had taken over the film and TV industry. His likely last (though uncredited) work came in Season 4 of "Game of Thrones," where he helped pull off King Joffrey's (Jack Gleeson) gory death scene.