'Me and the moustache sit together': Makeup designer Wakana Yoshihara on creating Poirot's iconic look

After a long day on the set of A Haunting in Venice, the latest Kenneth Branagh murder mystery based on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, hair and makeup designer Wakana Yoshihara would leave the crew, find a quiet space and sit down with the detective’s prodigious moustache, a sweeping half-moon of lush grey hair and attendant soul patch.

“It was my ritual every night after the shoot,” Yoshihara said recently in a video interview. “Me and the moustache sit together. Sometimes I have a conversation with the moustache. It was very therapeutic, when you get into that space. The moustache became like a friend.”

Yoshihara takes facial hair very seriously. The hair and makeup designer for Death on the Nile (2022) and A Haunting in Venice, which opened Friday, she is responsible for creating, styling and maintaining Poirot’s whiskers — a painstaking work of craftsmanship that is perhaps the most important detail in these period films. “This moustache is serious business,” director and star Branagh said when he took on the famous role for the 2017 Murder on the Orient Express. Yoshihara has made that business her own, and she does not take it lightly.

The first iteration of Branagh’s Poirot moustache was created for Orient Express by designer Carol Hemming, with whom Yoshihara worked closely as the head of the hair and makeup departments. The colossal grey swath of hair was meant to pay tribute to Poirot’s military background and the vogue after World War I.

But although the moustache looked suitably grand, it was heavy and ungainly, and presented many practical difficulties for Branagh as a performer. The star (who also directed but couldn’t be interviewed because of the current actors strike) was unable to open his mouth wide or laugh heartily without the hairpiece drooping or falling out of place. “You couldn’t make jokes around him on set,” Yoshihara said.

When Yoshihara took over for Hemming on the sequel, Death on the Nile, the first thing she discussed with Branagh was what they were to do about the moustache this time. “We talked about downsizing,” she said. “It can be smaller but still big enough for him to have the signature of being Poirot. We took some off both sides and kind of narrowed it down so it doesn’t quite cover his mouth.”

For Venice, Branagh initially wanted to grow his own moustache to Poirot length to obviate the need for the prosthetic. Although the length was adequate, Yoshihara ran into problems with the styling. To get the look right, she said, “I would have to use a perm, and I can’t really use a hot stick so close to his face, because I might burn him.” In the end, she opted to have him shave what he had grown, and the two went back to the usual method — albeit with more refinements.

Yoshihara and Branagh revised the false moustache even further for Venice, making it slightly smaller again and blonder. (The hue was meant to give Branagh a 'more youthful' appearance that would stave off the impression that Poirot was getting older and older between films.) She explained that Poirot was on vacation in the desert in Nile, which gave the moustache a wind-swept, natural character, but in Venice, Poirot is retired with more freedom to attend to his grooming. “We made it look like he had lots of time on his hands,” she said. “It’s more sculpted. It’s neater. It’s like Poirot has finally found his best style.”

The false moustache is a combination of human and yak hair. The human kind 'is a bit too silky' and soft, she said, but the yak addition results in a bushier, more bristly look appropriate for a moustache. The strands are meticulously woven into a thin strip of silk. When she receives that woven strip from the wigmaker, Yoshihara said, “it looks like a caveman’s hair, very long, so you have to cut it and style it.” Yoshihara works from a plaster model of Branagh’s head to get the moustache exactly symmetrical. Then, when it's time to film, she applies it directly to Branagh’s face with a special adhesive similar to super glue.

Despite the effort involved in creating and applying the prosthetic, the result should still 'look natural and not made up,' as if the hair were really growing on his face. Striking the right balance between naturalistic and theatrical meant dozens of screen tests with sample moustaches, each of a slightly different length, shape and shade.

“You need that trial and error to know what looks wrong and what looks right,” she said. On Nile, she said, they went through so many options that they didn’t ultimately decide on one until the first day of the shoot.

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