Transforming actors into well-known figures such as Tammy Wynette and Princess Diana was a challenge for artisans, who experimented with techniques to come up with hair and makeup that would look authentic to viewers.
Cate Hall spent hours with Elizabeth Debicki as she recreated Princess Diana’s sophisticated hairdo from the early 1990s for Season 5 of “The Crown.” Through a series of incremental tweaks to the wig—and a lot of patience from Debicki—Hall got the look she wanted.
“You hold hands as you continue to cut the wig with a razor blade and slowly move into a shape that feels recognizable,” she recalled of her collaboration with Debicki.
Hall admits that on her first try at the wig, Debicki looked more like a “lady named Brenda from 1983” than the glamorous royal. But she kept working on it.
And once she got it right, it was a matter of the other departments stepping in with costumes and production design.
Jessica Chastain (BTS) George & Tammy: Credit: SHOWTIME
Thanks to Showtime
Jessica Chastain’s resident hair and makeup team, Linda Dowds and Stephanie Ingram, helped the Oscar winner for “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” become country singer Tammy Wynette for Showtime’s “George and Tammy.” Chastain has already won a SAG award for her performance on the series.
Dowds used light and shadow to hollow out parts of Chastain’s face and used latex wrinkle dots for subtle aging effects. “The contour and highlight way of aging is really helpful,” says Dowds. That meant applying shading techniques to the creases of Chastain’s face and using a highlighter to accentuate any raised areas. By wrinkling the skin, “you can get fine lines around the eyes, pull on the neck, and get the tops of the hands,” she explains.
The key, says Dowds, was to keep the color palette soft. “We upped the eye makeup a bit with bigger lashes,” says Dowds.
Ingram’s hairstyles added to the look, as did Mitchell Travers’ costumes. But Dowds, who won an Oscar for her work on “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” alongside Ingram and Justin Raleigh, warns that there’s a danger in going too big with a character’s hair and makeup.
“If you end up with big makeup, big hair, and a big costume, sometimes they fight each other,” she says. “What worked for us was that natural, sophisticated look that Tammy had to showcase the rest of the look for that specific time period.”
Welcome to Chippendales – An elaborate true crime saga, “Welcome to Chippendales” tells the outrageous story of Somen “Steve” Banerjee, an Indian immigrant who became the unlikely founder of the world’s largest male stripping empire – and nothing in left his shoes. way in the process. Steve (Kumail Nanjiani), shown. (Photo by: Erin Simkin/Hulu)
Erin Simkin/Hulu
The hair and makeup team working on Hulu’s “Welcome to Chippendales” had a bit more discretion, since Steve Banerjee, the man at the center of the limited series, isn’t as well known as Wynette or Princess Diana. Banerjee, played by Kumail Nanjiani, transforms from a working-class immigrant into a successful nightclub owner.
The only time the public sees Banerjee unshaven and unkempt is when he’s “the regular guy who works at a convenience store,” notes Head of Makeup Department David Williams. But Banerjee also idolizes Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and soon opens a nightclub with exotic male dancers, which was an anomaly at the time.
“He aspires to be something different from this working-class guy who saved everything he could,” says Williams, who used makeup contouring to make Nanjiani’s face look heavier. “So he’s faking it until he makes it.”
The head of the hair department, Barry Lee Moe, knew there was going to be a lot of hair in “Welcome to Chippendales” – “tons of hair, to be exact”, due to its setting in the disco era and beyond.
When dealing with real people, Moe says, “Some of these people still exist. So it’s always a thin line deciding which direction to go when portraying these characters on the TV show.
He adds, “We tried to stay away from exact copies of anyone because there wasn’t really a need to tell the story.”