Make-up design doesn’t always mean prosthetics or extremes — that’s why the Emmy Awards smartly single out contemporary make-up design as its own category. But too often, those more immediately arresting designs are the ones that get all the attention. Not anymore. Join IndieWire in celebrating the make-up artists creating subtle, character-specific work for contemporary characters with our series, “Making Up Is Hard to Do.”
Look, sometimes subtlety is for the weak.
“What We Do in the Shadows” has always been the rare delight of a comedy set in a contemporary setting that still gets to play with a cornucopia of mixed-up period details and fantastic monsters. It is as big and broad as it can be, in part because the comedy lives in its contrast between ordinary Staten Islanders and the Vampire Residence that has so fascinated us, and also, apparently, the Maysles brothers.
For six seasons, the show’s aesthetic choices have given everyone who is actually behind the camera — from the production design team to the costumers, editors, sound designers, and monster-makers — the chance to really play with what a half-hour comedy can look like. But Season 6, in particular, allowed the “What We Do in the Shadows” makeup department room to expand on their established looks for our favorite crew of Staten Island vampires and ex-familiar — and they got to do it three different times in the finale alone.
Depending on whether you watched the finale on FX, on Hulu, or on Disney+, the “perfect ending” for the series that Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) hypnotizes the viewer into watching is either a strange, feverish remix of the endings of “The Usual Suspects,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” or “Newhart” staring the vampires and friends — the FX screeners sent out in advance had the “Usual Suspects” ending. Makeup department head Sarah Milk told IndieWire it was great to have one last chance to transform the characters in different ways.
“We got to explore and play a bit,” Milk said of Season 6. “And that was nice because for a lot of the show, it was the vampires as they were and then we had all these new scenarios. We got to make some of the vampires look a little bit different or have a different character.”
The most obvious examples are the hallucinatory endings embedded in the finale — just as it was fun to have Doug Jones out of his creature suits as The Baron, it’s fun to take off The Guide’s (Kristen Schaal) blonde wig and remove her vampire pallor so she can take up Chazz Palminteri’s suspenders, or to give everyone an element of still looking damned while looking a lot more human for the “Rosemary’s Baby” homage. But Milk and her team also got to play with the vampire’s makeup by having them in much more brightly lit, human spaces in Season 6.
Particularly in the hallways of Canon Capital, things that Milk had been doing for years on “Shadows” finally became a lot more noticeable for viewers. “The shots [for the series] were always filmed with candlelight,” Milk said. “It was quite dark. So with [Nadja’s] bangs and the way that the lighting worked, I wanted to have elements that would reflect the light a bit. That’s why we first added glitter — but you can finally see it in Season 6 really well. Whereas in earlier seasons, they were outside in the world, but in Canon Capital, the lighting is so different and you can really see what we did.”
Milk and her team obviously amped up Nadja’s working girl look with more color that was extended higher to make her makeup really scream ‘80s. But the show’s constraints still held on making the vampires look a little dead. So Milk and her team did a lot of their work around the vampires’ eyes.
It was important “for the light to capture [Nadja’s] eyes a bit so that her improv would read for the camera,” Milk said. “That was something we did for all the characters. We really focused on their eyes, by either adding a little bit of a deep tone — like a taupe or a brown, whatever suited their natural skin tone — just to highlight the eyes.”
Because of the FX series’s mockumentary style, everyone on camera has to appear as memorably and immediately to the audience as they do to the ostensible documentary crew — shoutout to Nate the boom operator and Greg the A Camera operator, whom Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) may or may not be secretly fucking. Especially with Nandor (Kayvan Novak), it was important to balance paling out his skin without losing his skin tone or having all of the makeup work get blasted out by the show’s lights.
“The challenge was making [Nandor] look dead without making him look clownish,” Milk said. “So I would pale out a skin tone with some of his own skin tone peeking through, and then add a bit of a darker powder to mute it down so that it read.”
For those wishing to prolong the documentary experience of “What We Do in the Shadows” for themselves, or perhaps to explore the future adventures of The Phantom Menace and The Cowboy Kid, Milk told IndieWire it’s actually pretty straightforward to turn yourself into one of New York’s vampire gangs.
“Take your complexion and pale it down maybe one to two shades. You can either use a beauty blender — a damp beauty blender, which I like because it just evens out the makeup without having it sit on your face,” Milk said. “Then I would take a cooler color, so instead of a bronzer looking kind of orange, it’s going to look more taupe and you’re going to follow the natural hollows of your cheeks or your chin, depending on if you want it to look more feminine or masculine, and you can play with that.”
But looking back on the series, Milk is extremely proud of what her department was able to do on an extremely fast-paced comedy schedule — from custom-designed tattoos for the Vampire Carnies in Episode 9 to vampirizing (siring?) over 200 extras and giving Eric Northman (and/or Alexander Skarsgård) extra smokey eyeliner to fabricated homemade blood on Nadja as she’s tearing apart the graveyard vampires. “ We got to play with the blood splatter when she’s pummeling the zombie vampire. We were in a cemetery at like 5 a.m. and we were just in a black tent throwing blood,” Milk says.
To misquote Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), we shouldn’t cry because “What We Do in the Shadows” is over; we should smile because the blood splatter happened.
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