“I Just Wanted To Be Something Different”: Behind the Scenes on Heidi Klum’s Hilarious and Hideous Halloween Costume

The worm wants to have a word. 

When German-American model, television host, philanthropist, and businesswoman Heidi Klum was thinking about her 2022 Halloween costume, she knew it had to be big. Her last two annual bashes were canceled thanks to COVID, so this year really had to burrow into public consciousness. In previous years she’d appeared as a Transformer, Jessica Rabbit, Fiona from Shrek, and Kali, the Hindu Goddess of Death. This time “I just wanted to be something different and unexpected,” she told The Hollywood Reporter on Friday. And indeed she did. Her creative spirit was the soil for her shocking “rain worm” costume that simultaneously delighted and nauseated anyone with access to Instagram last week. 

The finished product, as if larvae and rotten bacon got into the Brundlefly machine (or a gender-bent God Emperor of Dune) was, at first, something that Mike Marino, owner of Prosthetic Renaissance, didn’t think could work. The designer, who has worked on many of Klum’s notable late October looks (as well as movies like The Batman, Black Swan, and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb), worried that “this costume idea was so big and it had to happen in [real time and in] real life, no cuts for take two.” Klum’s desire was to transform into “a tubular invertebrate” pulled along by a line held by husband Tom Kaulitz, who would dress as a fisherman.

Marino got to work, though, hiring a team of artists to make sketches and create a three-dimensional model from body scans. Then the Academy Award-winning puppet master and creature designer Bill Bryan, whose previous victories include the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, Chucky from Child’s Play, and assorted ghouls, goblins, and gremlins from Army of Darkness, Men in Black, and, relevant to all things wormy, David Lynch’s version of Dune, got into it. 

The suit was a combo of foam, spandex, and plastic tubes. Klum was zipped in (the zipper was concealed) and the section for her face was cast from silicone (which was glued and painted on.) 

The research and development of the costume took four months, and the final application took about twelve hours. The price tag for all this has yet to be divulged, but Marino did say, “it costs a lot more than anyone would think.”

“A suit like that can be claustrophobic because you have no access to your hands and your feet are very limited,” Marino warned anyone else who is looking to go as Klum’s worm next year. “Heidi wanted that,” he added, “because she wanted to feel more ‘worm-like.’”

The show-stopping Halloween enthusiast admitted that she was quite claustrophobic in her own brainchild. “It is one thing to add prosthetics to your body—but to be stuck inside the worm body and not really be able to use my arms or feet was not very comfortable.”

Like a champion, however, she shows few regrets. “Halloween,” she reminded THR, “is not about comfort.”

Okay, okay, so the big question: how did she pee?

The answer: she did not. “I made sure not to drink anything hours before getting into costume as I knew that there was no way to get in and out of it,” Klum said. Of course, we’ll never know if she actually pulled an Alan Shepherd on the launchpad maneuver, but we’ll take her at her word.