Looking closely at the image above will reveal that both Kuato and Marshall Bell are puppets. Instead of tying an animatronic to a live actor, Verhoeven had a life-size duplicate of Marshall Bell built, with the mutant Kuato as part of the construction. This meant that the puppeteers were not only operating Kuato’s face, eyes and arms, but also Marshall Bell’s head. Luckily, Bell’s character falls into a trance when Kuato speaks, so there weren’t many joints on the top of the puppet’s head.
Verhoeven was impressed by Kuato’s puppet, which he said was the most complicated construction made for “Total Recall” (warning: Verhoeven used dated and insensitive language to describe it):
“The most complex, of course, was Kuato. It had to be done with 15 puppeteers who would do everything… who would do the arms, the eyes and the mouth. [Rob] Bottin had made it so real that two people asked me if he was a real ‘monster,’ a half-born Siamese twin.”
“Siamese twin”, a dated term used to describe Siamese twin brothers, derives from the real-life Siamese twin brothers Chang and Eng Bunker, who became very wealthy as sideshow performers in the 1820s and 1830s. They were born in the Kingdom of Rattanakosin, or Kingdom of Siam, and were billed by their “trainer”, Robert Hunter, as Siamese Twins. In later years the term became a colloquialism for conjoined twins. Until the early 20th century, stage performances by people with extraordinary bodies – called “freak shows” for years – were fairly common circus acts. The practice died out in the 1930s and 1940s and the term became gauche. Verhoeven’s description is out of date.
But yes, Rob Bottin did an amazing job.
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