Was this character’s old age look CGI or make-up?

Question

At the end of Avengers: Endgame we saw an old

Steve Rogers.

The old version seemed very realistic. Was this done with CGI or make-up?

Answer 1

It was a mix of make up and prosthetics that were later augmented with CGI.

“Obviously, if it doesn’t work perfectly, it can undermine the emotional intention of the scene,” says Anthony Russo. “We did a lot of practical effects, so it was a very elaborate makeup job that was then augmented with CG, because there’s certain things that you can’t do with makeup in order to make Cap credibly that age.”

For example, he added: “You can’t shrink Chris Evans’ neck on set, you know what I mean? He’s still got that yoke neck.”

“He’s still a muscular man,” Joe added.

“Yeah, so [CG helps] things that you can’t achieve, like the way the face drops,” Anthony said. “It’s a balance we want to always strike between making him feel credibly aged, but also not compromising the performance.” Evans even managed to change his voice into a hushed rasp without any audio adjustments.

“We didn’t alter his voice at all,” Joe explained.

“We always say this about Chris — he’s so technically sophisticated as an actor and you can see it in that scene when he plays an old man,” Anthony added.

_{Entertainment Weekly, Avengers: Endgame directors answer Captain America mystery}

befores & afters have since published a couple of articles on how this was done including some set photos. We see Chris Evans in the full make up and the CGI dots and then the final CGI shot.

They also share that the team used an older actor for reference and he also stood in as a body double.

There were some prosthetics involved and we worked with Legacy Effects on that. We wanted to avoid having to deal with any of Chris Evans’ hair, if possible, so he was wearing a bald cap with wig. And then he was wearing a prosthetic on his neck. Everything from beneath the chin to the collar of his shirt is a prosthetic. On set he wore prosthetic crow’s feet by his eyes. Subsequently, in post production we removed those. We didn’t actually end up using those. But they were there to help. We just ended up going in a different direction.

And then Chris wore tracking dots on the rest of his face. So he looked kind of strange on set! He looked like young Chris Evans but with an old neck and crow’s feet. That was in Atlanta – it was actually at a farm outside of Atlanta. And we shot Chris doing all the takes and the performance first, just like we’ve always done with de-ageing, or even with skinny Steve back on the first Captain America.

And then we shot a picture double. In this case it was a gentleman named Patrick Gorman who’s a really phenomenal actor. He was the older double for Chris. He would watch whatever Chris did on set and duplicate it as well as he could, then I would direct him to look a little more to his left, look a little more to his right. Hold this pose, hold that pose, that sort of thing. Try and get the angles and things that we need so that we would have that on set reference for lighting and textures.

If you're interested in fully how they did it I recommend reading both articles completely as they include a lot of extra information on the process.

Answer 2

Based on this tweet from Chris Evans' twitter, it was at least partially done using make-up/prosthetics:

Halfway there

_{^{Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) 10 May 2019}}