Looking closely at the above image will reveal that both Kuato and Marshall Bell are puppets. Rather than strap an animatronic to a live actor, Verhoeven had a life-size Marshall Bell duplicate built, with the Kuato mutant as part of the construction. This meant that the puppeteers weren’t just 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 wasn’t a lot of articulation in the puppet’s upper head.

Verhoeven was impressed with the Kuato puppet, which he said was the most complicated construction made for “Total Recall” (warning: Verhoeven used some dated and insensitive language to describe it):

“The most complex one, of course, was Kuato. It had to be done with 15 puppeteers that would do all the –- that would do the arms, and the eyes, and the mouth. [Rob] Bottin had made the thing so real, two people asked me if it was a real ‘freak,’ a semi-born Siamese twin.”

“Siamese twin,” a dated term used to describe conjoined twin siblings, is derived from real-life conjoined twin brothers Chang and Eng Bunker, who became very wealthy as sideshow performers in the 1820s and 1830s. They were born in the Rattanakosin Kingdom, or the Kingdom of Siam, and were billed by their “handler,” Robert Hunter, as Siamese Twins. The term became a colloquialism for conjoined twins for years thereafter. Up until the early years of the 20th century, on-stage displays of people with extraordinary bodies — called “freak shows” for years — were fairly common circus entertainments. The practice died out in the 1930s and 1940s, and the term became gauche. Verhoeven’s description is old-fashioned.

But, yes, Rob Bottin did an amazing job.