When the producers of Leprechaun Returns went to Masters FX in Toronto, they weren’t just looking for someone to do the makeup for their Leprechaun. They hired Steven Kostanski to direct the movie too. Kostanski jumped at the chance and right away began designing new looks for the titular monster.

“I actually sculpted two maquettes,” Kostanski said. “Right after I took the project, I immediately dived into redesigning the character. The character is a little nastier, meaner and a little messed up. The idea is he’s been in this well for 25 years so I wanted to reflect that in the makeup and not have it be clean and pristine, to make him look old and menacing. I sculpted two versions of the makeup, tiny versions of them to show people and get approvals on. All the producers were into it so it carries the spirit of the original Leprechaun makeup. We definitely kept certain forms and elements to that, but it’s definitely a step in a different direction.”

Once they hired Linden Porco to play the Leprechaun, they made the makeup life size to fit his face.

“Basically they did a foam prosthetic,” Porco told us. “They had 19 different two-piece prosthetics. It was a pretty smooth process with Graham [Chivers] and Nicola [Bendrey]. They were absolutely amazing to work with. I’d just lie down. They’d put this cap on first and they did the face features, and it was the lips as well. It was about a three-hour process every day. It was super smooth.”

Even after the three hour makeup job, it took Porco a few more minutes to break in his new face.

“For about the first 15 minutes, like anything you put on, it’s going to be tough to move around,” Porco said. “I got used to it pretty easily. It was pretty easy to move and react to everything that I had to do.”

It wasn’t just his face though. This Leprechaun has a nasty set of chompers too.

“That was actually the toughest thing to get used to for sure was the teeth,” Porco said.

“We had to grind some stuff down in order for it to fit. Once we did that it was way easier, but it’s like anything. The more you use it, the better you sound.”

Porco could still speak and do his dialogue with the teeth in. He said he only did a minimal amount of ADR to rerecord a line here and there.

“We did six hours or seven hours of ADR after it but not too much,” Porco said. “It was mostly just lines here and there that I couldn’t pick up on certain things. I would say probably a quarter [of the movie].”

Perhaps the most restrictive element of the Leprechaun costume was the wardrobe.

“It was a bit of a process to get the wardrobe on just because there was a lot of layers and how detailed it was,” Porco said. “It would have to take some time before takes to get things on and off just because I’d run at a pretty hot temperature. I didn’t want to stay in the overalls and coat the whole time. I would be cooking.”

The makeup couldn’t go on and off that easily, so Porco had to learn to navigate his Leprechaun face at lunch.

“I started off doing shakes for most meals,” he said. “I just found that my body needed to eat something, so I would just have to be very careful, especially because I had the prosthetic lips as well. So I would put the food in, try and eat slowly and make sure I didn’t mess up the makeup.”

Leprechaun Returns is out on home video and VOD Tuesday, December 11.