10 Actors Who Totally Transformed Themselves For TV Shows

Acting is in its very essence the art of inhabiting the presence of another person (or creature!), and while actors will often end up playing roles not unlike themselves, many relish the opportunity to disappear entirely into a polar opposite role.

The Oscars alone prove just how much everyone loves seeing an actor undergo a jaw-dropping, unrecognisable transformation to play a character, especially if they're a beloved real-life figure.

When an actor combines their natural talents with state-of-the-art makeup effects, they're able to transcend their high-profile public persona and deliver a mesmerising chameleon act, ensuring audiences are entirely convinced that they're indeed somebody else.

We hear about this a lot in the bigger-budget, slower-moving world of movie production, though TV shows by their nature tend to be more constrained by both budgets and time.

And so, it's rarer that we see actors spending hours and hours per day in the makeup chair to completely transform themselves, but it does certainly happen, as these 10 stunning examples prove.

These performers, whether layered underneath ludicrous amounts of makeup and prosthetics or simply committing their body to a brutal transformation, all successfully became their characters in the most literal, physical way...

In the second season of Donald Glover's hit dramedy show Atlanta, Glover underwent a transformation that only be called "drastic," in so much as the vast majority of viewers and even Glover's own co-stars in the episode, Derrick Haywood and Lakeith Stanfield, had no idea it was in fact him.

In the episode "Teddy Perkins," Glover wore extensive makeup, facial prosthetics, and a wig to become the title character - an eccentric, creepy man with debilitating photosensitivity whose mask-like face and general mannerisms are reminiscent of later-life Michael Jackson.

The most radical aspect of the makeup job is, of course, that Glover effectively donned "whiteface" to portray Perkins, ensuring Teddy isn't merely a uniquely unnerving presence but also satirically flips Hollywood's racist tradition of blackface.

In order to maintain the ruse that he was just some random actor, Glover stayed in makeup and character throughout shooting, even refusing to be credited for the part.

The episode's director, Hiro Murai, called staring at Glover in makeup "uncanny and unsettling." Too true.