Over the course of five months, Bohanna's team handcrafted more than one hundred suits, each of which consisted of three-hundred-and-twenty custom-made components and one-hundred-and-fifty pieces of additional procured and manufactured parts, nuts, bolts, etc. The production was, in Bohanna's words, "a proper assembly line." Components were molded and fused before finding their way to the fabrication shop where they would be sanded, painted, and cleaned up. "All the [computer-aid design] drawing, all the prototype work, all the modeling, all the casting, all the fabrication, artwork, and assembly were done in-house," Bohanna explains in an article for Entertainment Weekly. In the end, the Edge of Tomorrow design team developed three versions of the exosuit: "dogs," with rocket launchers; "tanks," with super-sized machine guns; and "grunts," with smaller firearms. Each suit featured multiple built-in microphones which were seamlessly incorporated into the suit's design in collaboration with the sound team. In addition to hidden mics in the helmets, another was concealed in a box on the front of the suit. This contained a lavalier with a furry widescreen concealed behind a painted mesh screen. According to production sound mixer Stuart Wilson in an article for 695 Quarterly (his local IATSE union's official magazine), several mics were destroyed but "all in all, they survived pretty well." Outfitted with shock absorbers, the movement of the suits was realized by wirework, via stunt coordinator/second unit director Simon Crane, and the actors themselves. With a few exceptions, all the suits featured a one-size-fits-all design. This could accommodate actors anywhere from 5'4" to 6'5" in height. As Bohanna describes in a 2021 interview for the podcast Craft Services, actors would strap themselves into the frame and effectively puppeteer the suit manually as they moved around. Speaking to The Irish Times, Bohanna says the build was "an enormous amount of work we ended up with a crew of about one-hundred-and-seventy people making all these detailed suits in different sizes. We had to produce one-hundred-and-thirty of them. It was a colossal undertaking." This isn't to say that Bohanna wasn't above a budget-friendly hack here and there. "I think we spent about £4,000 on cable ties," he says in the Entertainment Weekly article. "If something popped off, we'd just snap them back together." The suits "are meant to look like military pieces of hardware, not a refined piece of engineering," Bohanna explains to Entertainment Weekly. "They're brash, quickly-made pieces of equipment. So you've got to see the guys struggling in them." And struggle they did. The suits weighed eighty-five pounds (thirty-nine kilograms) on average. At their heaviest, depending on the armaments, the suits could weigh anywhere between one-hundred-and-twenty-five and one-hundred-and-thirty pounds (fifty-six to fifty-nine kilograms). Some of the suits, made primarily out of foam rubber, were presumably lighter. But one suit, outfitted with an over-the-shoulder weapon, clocked in at one-hundred-and-seventy-six pounds (eighty kilograms), per Bohanna's estimation. Actors would only feel the weight when they moved. And specially designed chain rigs allowed performers to take the weight off their shoulders between takes. "They'd basically bring in these A-frames, it looks like a kid's swing set," Emily Blunt describes in the Entertainment Weekly article. "And they have hooks hanging from it. And you have five people hang you on these things to take the suit off you. As producer Jeffrey Silver neatly puts it in Edge of Tomorrow: Weapons of the Future, the main challenge for the performers was "to make the costume look like [it] was powering them whereas, in fact, they were powering the costume." Even Tom Cruise, admits to never fully conquering the exosuit, describing the ordeal to USA Today as "physically grueling." During an appearance on Ellen, Blunt confessed to crying when she first put on the suit. "I'm not really a crier," she says in a clip from the talk show, "but I felt completely overwhelmed that I was going to have five months of this." The weight of the suits was an unavoidable result of the demands of the production schedule (the dropship sequence figured early in the shoot). As a result, there was no time to experiment with lighter materials like carbon fiber. The weight also required some digital parts to be tracked to accommodate Blunt's smaller size. One digital element featured on every model: the guns mounted on the back of each suit. Per Davis to Cinefex: "They built practical ones for us to scan and photograph, but they never got used in the movie. They were always digital." Outfitting the actors required a team of four handlers per actor. During the testing phase, it took Tom Cruise around thirty minutes to get into the suit and an additional thirty minutes to take it off. Unsatisfied with the loss of time, Cruise informed the team that he wanted to get the turnaround time to under a minute. "In the end we timed it and to get me into the suit took thirty seconds," Cruise explains to USA Today.

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