Coming off the high of being on stage with Brie Larson to receive an award for a movie about death and Boston accents, Casey Affleck gets to play dead in his next film. Ghost Story, also starring Rooney Mara, looks like a modern-day Ghost in which Affleck’s character is depicted as a haunting ghost figure wearing an actual bed sheet.
Similar to the movie Affleck won Best Actor for, this one also concerns death and trauma. According to Variety, “the film, which premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, takes place almost entirely in a single house in Texas with a ghost wearing the bed sheet after Affleck’s character dies in a car accident.”
Now you’re wondering: Is that really Casey Affleck under the bed sheet? Apparently, yes. It’s not CGI. Director David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon) told USA Today, “Initially, we thought we’d just throw a sheet on Casey and that’d be the end of it”:
But after a couple of “goofy” screen tests, costume designer Annell Brodeur layered multiple petticoats underneath to make the sheet appear fuller. They also tested out various shapes and sizes of eyes. “We found that if you cut holes in a sheet, the eyes just turn into slits when someone puts it on,” which is why they built padding into the costume so “the face (would) stay solid and eyes circular.”
Affleck himself is reportedly not on screen for most of the movie, another performance worthy of Best Actor.