Bad Bunny’s Prosthetics Designer Reveals How He Aged the Singer Five Decades

“Fifty-three years.” That’s how long Bad Bunny joked his old-age transformation took for the 2026 Met Gala. In reality, says his prosthetics designer Mike Marino, the day-of process took three hours—plus a half-hour of makeup removal at the end of the night (micellar water, in this instance, would not cut it). Then there were the six weeks of prep: the scanning, designing, sculpting, and sewing until the multiple, hyperrealistic prosthetic pieces were complete.

Never one to follow the crowd, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio chose to tap into a section of the Costume Art exhibition that focused on bodies often overlooked in fashion and art, including pregnant and aging figures. Committed to exploring aging as an art, the singer’s team reached out to Marino, whose award-winning prosthetic designs you can spot in films like The Batman and The Irishman, and series like The Penguin and True Detective, not to mention Heidi Klum every Halloween since 2011.

Bad Bunny wearing prosthetics that make him look 80 years old.

Marino is no stranger to aging people (The Weeknd for his Dawn FM cover, for example) or transforming them completely (hours before he began working on Bad Bunny on Monday night, he was morphing Klum into a marble statue). But for the singer’s Met Gala appearance, Marino felt he needed a more realistic, almost regal approach to a travel through time. “The fact that he’s distinguished and well-groomed is on purpose,” says Marino, who thought making Bad Bunny look weary and hunched would not have felt right for fashion’s most glamorous night of the year.

Marino was also continuing a long tradition in art history of presenting idealized representations of people and the human body. “If you think about famous portrait painters like [John Singer] Sargent and [Diego] Velázquez, they were often painting an idealized image of the subject, manipulating how they look to make them look more beautiful, or more colorful, more powerful in that portrait,” he says, referencing Velázquez’s painting of King Philip IV and the many propaganda paintings of Napoleon I. “I thought it was cool that, with his grooming, [Bad Bunny] had this distinguished look that was as if a Velázquez or Sargent portrait came to life.”