An hour before Balenciaga’s spring 2025 runway show in Paris on Monday night, Jack Nicholson walked out of the Scribe hotel in a white hotel bathrobe and slippers, gin and cigar in hand, and got into a white stretch limousine to head to the show. His sunglasses were on, his hair wild and askew, his unmistakable grin plastered across his face.
Technically, Mr. Nicholson’s smile wasn’t plastered. His teeth were custom fakes created by a dental special effects expert, and his distinctive curled lips and cheeks were molded and sculpted silicone prosthetics that had been glued onto the face of Elliot Joseph Rentz, a performance and makeup artist known to 1.3 million Instagram followers as his drag persona Alexis Stone.
Mr. Rentz was greeted like a celebrity upon arrival at the Balenciaga show. He ambled around the front row like a disheveled, mildly intoxicated 60-something man, gamely posing for photographers and selfies. He answered to “Jack!,” a look of permanent amusement stretched across his silicone face. He was seated at the enormous table that served as a runway for the show, joined by Nicole Kidman, Lindsay Lohan, Salma Hayek Pinault, Katy Perry and Anna Wintour (the real ones).
Mr. Rentz spent six hours transforming himself from a youthful 30-year-old man to Mr. Nicholson in his peak late 1990s, early 2000s era. Prosthetics covered Mr. Rentz’s entire head and neck. There was a bodysuit and chest piece. Look closely and the robe was embroidered with “Balenciaga Hotels” under a five-star crest.
Just before he walked out the door, Mr. Rentz applied the finishing touch, a custom fragrance developed by the perfumer John Stephen to capture the olfactory essence of what Mr. Nicholson might smell like.
“He designed it to smell like wet ashtray,” Mr. Rentz said. It was convincing.
“We’re very much doing grumpy Jack,” Mr. Rentz said in the hotel lobby the day before the fashion show. “Whenever we see these images of Jack over the last two decades, it’s always him smoking a cigarette in the water, putting sunscreen on whilst eating a hot dog or him at a Lakers show looking particularly grumpy.”
Now 87, Mr. Nicholson, who was a longtime courtside regular at Los Angeles Lakers games, is rarely seen in public. He hasn’t acted in a film since James L. Brooks’s “How Do You Know” in 2010. On a table in Mr. Rentz’s hotel suite was a 1991 unauthorized biography and old magazines like Radio Times and Life Icons featuring Mr. Nicholson on the cover.
In the past few years, Mr. Rentz has become a familiar, if unrecognizable, presence on the fashion show circuit. He attended his first Balenciaga fashion show in March 2022 as Robin Williams’s character in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Since then, he has sat front row at eight more Balenciaga shows impersonating celebrities in character and out: Glenn Close as Cruella DeVil, Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestley. He has attended Diesel fashion shows dressed as Jennifer Coolidge and Madonna.
The Met Gala has been on his list of dream projects, but “the powers above prohibited that from happening,” Mr. Rentz said, presumably Ms. Wintour.
“Of course, it’s a marketing stunt,” Mr. Rentz said, who gets approval from Balenciaga’s creative director Demna and his husband, BFRND, on whom to impersonate each season.
Mr. Rentz doesn’t usually dress up as men. “They don’t offer me as much bite as women,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I’m a raging homosexual.” But Mr. Nicholson is the kind of Hollywood icon in whom Mr. Rentz could find novelty and complexity. “I just think Jack’s a really bad-ass visual character to do,” he said.
As the Balenciaga show ended, Mr. Rentz walked out arm in arm with Nadia Lee Cohen, the model-influencer-artist-photographer who also likes to transform herself. “Slayed” was Mr. Rentz’s reply when asked how he thought Jack landed at the show.
“I don’t get nervous any more,” he said. “The gin helped.”
Mr. Rentz spends about three months perfecting each transformation from a technical perspective — makeup, prosthetics, body language — noting that the work can cost upward of $50,000 to produce. He said the brand usually covers the production costs and his attendance fee.
“I don’t consider myself to be a troll or a prankster, but there is something entertaining about attending a show where most people are so consumed with looking their very best while presenting as someone else,” Mr. Rentz said.
Mr. Rentz grew up in council housing in Brighton, England, in the 1990s in what he described as a broken family. He has an identical twin brother, who is not remotely part of the entertainment, fashion or drag world. When the brothers were young, Mr. Rentz said, his mother used to paint one of his fingernails pink and his brother’s blue to tell them apart.
“That set the tone,” Mr. Rentz said.
From a young age, Mr. Rentz, who was diagnosed with autism as an adult, was fascinated with using makeup and special effects to realistically transform into someone else. “It’s really interesting that with just a little bit of trickery, you can convince the masses that you’re not only somebody else, that you come from a completely different world of life,” he said. He loved films like “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Big Mama” and begged his parents for clip-in teeth, fat suits and old lady wigs.
“It was never wanting to be this beautiful woman,” he said. “I wanted to be unrecognizable.”
Mr. Rentz left home at 16 for London and briefly worked in fashion before getting into drag for about 10 years, working in clubs but also focusing on prosthetics and blurring the lines between what’s real and fake.
“I could control the image, the character, the visuals, the wardrobe,” he said. He chose the name Alexis Stone in homage to a number of his heroes: Alexis Colby from “Dynasty,” Alexis Meade from “Ugly Betty” and Sharon Stone (in her “Basic Instinct” era). He lived in Sweden, Germany, New York and South Carolina before moving back to Britain. He now lives in Glasgow.
In 2018, Mr. Rentz gained international notoriety for staging an extreme plastic surgery stunt, declaring on his social media channels that he would spend all his money on cosmetic procedures. He documented the process over the course of six months as well as the social media backlash to his “botched” surgical look before revealing that the whole thing was fake.
“It was kind of like a ‘Black Mirror’ episode,” he said. Demna and BFRND came calling, initially interested in working with Mr. Rentz to transform models into different ideas of beauty for a Balenciaga show. Covid squelched that project, but eventually Mr. Rentz collaborated with the brand for his Mrs. Doubtfire transformation in 2022. A new, niche career path was born.
For the past two years, the production company Division has had a documentary film crew shadowing Mr. Rentz, capturing what he calls “the unhinged-ness” of what he does. He said he often gets requests to do political transformations — Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk — which he declines. Likewise, Princess Diana and Kylie Jenner. (“Too obvious,” he said.)
As for what the future holds for this niche line of work, “I’m not going to dress up as old women my whole life, as much as I would love to,” he said. But he never knows what the next gig will bring.
“I am not expecting Jack to call me on Tuesday,” Mr. Rentz said. “But it does open lots of different doorways every few months.
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