In a herculean feat of fan devotion, Stranger Things viewers spent more than a billion (yes, that’s “billion” a “b”) hours on the last two episodes of Stranger Things season 4. And if you spent a chunk of your own TV-watching time focused on Eleven’s bloody tears, Eddie’s foreboding tattoos, and/or Hopper’s gruesome injuries, you have Amy L. Forsythe to thank.
The makeup department head of all four seasons of Stranger Things did particularly brilliant work during season 4…and it may or may not have killed Joseph Quinn’s beloved Eddie Munson. Okay, fine, not exactly. But Forsythe *did* create the bat bites that did Eddie in, along with her work on Robin and Nancy’s glam, Hopper’s prison injuries, and Eleven’s rare makeup moments. All in all, this work has earned her and the rest of the Stranger Things makeup department a well-deserved 2022 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Period and/or Character Makeup (Non-Prosthetic).
A bonus? Forsythe somehow found time to collaborate with MAC Cosmetics on a limited edition Stranger Things makeup collection and also hop on the phone with Cosmopolitan to talk through her artistry on the show.
Fans may have a ways to go until season 5 confirms or denies their many storyline theories, but Forsythe’s insight and behind-the-scenes tales (did you know Chrissy’s powder-blue eyeshadow is by Florence by Mills, aka Millie Bobby Brown’s makeup line?) will offer reprieve for the weary fan.
Read on for Cosmo‘s Q&A with Stranger Things‘s resident makeup genius herself.
Congratulations on the Emmy nomination! What was your immediate reaction to the news?
All of my team in Atlanta, we have a text chain together, and they were crying. It was just beautiful. A lot of these people, this is the first big show they’ve ever worked on. So we’re so grateful.
Who was the first person you told when you found out?
I called my mom. She was so excited. But I mean, my mom is my mom. So she’s like, ‘I’m not surprised!’
Let’s talk Stranger Things. A big question I have off the bat is how do you evolve the makeup looks for each character from season to season? I think of Nancy, who feels less buttoned up than season 1 in her makeup arc.
Season 1 to season 2 for Nancy specifically, she ended up a complete badass, you know what I mean? She was so buttoned up, and then she’s got a shotgun. She’s not the wallflower, bookworm type anymore. She can take care of herself, so what does she look like now?
Every time we start a season, she’s got her look, but then it deconstructs over the season and she ends up kind of like a scream queen with a rock-and-roll vibe. This season, I wanted her to be sultry and smudgy and less completely put together. I think it worked out really well, especially with her perm and her curls looser than last season. And she’s got a definite Nancy brow. It’s not what Natalia [Dyer] normally has. We fill her brows out to have that classic ’80s fluff.
It’s fun to see you take on these ’80s trends and styles and incorporate them into situations that are often nightmarish.
100 percent, and this season we got to bring in more of those ’80s stereotypes. We got to fill the world in around our main cast, and we had new characters that kind of check the boxes of types of people we haven’t seen yet featured in the show. Like preppy Angela, who’s the bully, and innocent little Chrissy with her soft blue eyeshadow and natural flushed cheeks and pink lip.
These things are really fun. And beyond that, our background is a big character. Showcasing the rest of the ’80s in the background of the roller rink and in the high school in Northern California was really fun.
That’s for sure. It helps the audience fall in love with them, recognizing these trends even when they’re on screen for a short amount of time. It makes me think of the work you did on Joseph Quinn’s character Eddie, who the fans latched to immediately.
Oh my gosh, immediately. Immediately. The second the first volume dropped. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s gonna happen when we kill Eddie? Oh my gosh, everyone’s gonna go apeshit.’ And it was like, yeah. Everyone’s DMing me like, ‘Why, why? Why Eddie??’
As if you personally made that decision.
But you know, I did, in fact, kill him. So I mean, I guess… [laughs]
I want to hear more about his bat bite wounds. They’re so intricate, but rewatching the show itself, we don’t see them super up-close. How long did they take to create?
To create them, it took quite a bit. We had already established what a bite looks like on Joe Keery and Steve, when he had the bat fight at the lake, but that was also very involved. You have to reach out to the effects team and be like, ‘What does a Demobat look like? How big is its mouth? What do the teeth look like? How big are the teeth? He gets strangled by the tail; what does that look like? Is there anything on it that would scrape him?’ And yeah, there are little barbs on the end of the tail, so I put scrapes on Steve’s neck.
Jason Collins at Autonomous F/X sculpted some things for me for Joe Keerey, for Steve’s bat wounds, and then I [met] with effects and they would be like, ‘Oh yeah, maybe the edges are more jagged because the teeth are like little razors, and they’re munching.’ So I go back with that information to Jason, and he sends me the final sculpt.
With Eddie, I’m like, he has to die from this. So let’s figure out placement. The show sends me a storyboard of what will be happening to him. I asked the Duffers, ‘Okay, how many of these do you actually want on him?’ And they’re like, ‘Look at the storyboards and put them wherever they munch.’ And I’m like, ‘Do they go through leather coats? Do they go through boots?’ And they were like, ‘Absolutely.’ So my initial test on Joe Quinn was basically trying to figure out major pieces of damage. And then after that, we brought in costumes.
There were five artists. We each had a board of all of the wound placements from the test, and then all of the pre-painted pieces. Each person had, I want to say, six pieces. What would have been a four-hour makeup ended up being an hour and a half with the five of us. It was like okay, the five of us will just attack him, basically, with these bat bites.
And we did it! We did it in an hour and a half, and he got to set. But, you know, things happen and there wasn’t enough time for costumes to rip the clothes open. So what you see is just the hero pieces on his face, which is fine because those are the most important anyways for the moment between him and Dustin when he’s dying, and at least those were finished. We made sure the ones that were going to be featured were in pristine condition. I’m glad we got to show the world what we had underneath his clothes [in pictures] but that’s not really what’s important to the story.
I do think fans will have opinions when they hear there could have been a less clothed Joseph Quinn on screen.
[laughs] Well it’s not like his whole shirt would have been ripped open, but yeah, I know.
Looking back, what was the most challenging wound makeup you’ve had to do on Stranger Things?
I feel like the supernatural element of our show makes it a little bit more fun. So that’s a fun challenge. Like we had to slash Hopper’s arm from the Demogorgon and bite his arm from the Demodog, and it’s like ‘What do these wounds look like? What are these creatures? What are their bite patterns? And how can you make it cool looking instead of just like, oh, it looks like someone just chopped your arm, you know?’ So if something has a flower petal shape to their face and bites down, the teeth patterns have to be in all different directions. Mapping that kind of stuff out is really fun.
What about in fight sequences, how does makeup application factor in? I think of Lucas and Jason getting progressively bloodier, do they have to pause the scene for you to go in and do that?
Fight sequences are fun, but they’re very tedious. Most of our season was shot out of order because of COVID, so a lot of the aftermath things were established before the actual fight or injury took place. You have to reverse engineer everything and map it all out on a face chart and a body chart, where the certain beats happen.
Like, mapping it blow by blow?
Blow by blow. I tell production ahead of time, ‘This one’s gonna take this long, this one’s gonna take this long.’ And we’re adding as we go. So it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna give you this actor during this moment, because now we have the other actor.’ It’s kind of like playing ping pong with who’s in the chair getting their prosthetics and who’s actually on set fighting.
Are there any makeup easter eggs you can share that fans haven’t caught yet?
Makeup easter eggs?
Like one thing you put on Instagram I thought was cool was Eleven putting on a little bit of makeup during her date with Mike. Stuff like that.
She has a little bit of lip gloss and a little bit of mascara. She is excited to see her boyfriend. You know, she doesn’t look like that in school because she gets bullied and she’s just like, ‘Why am I putting in effort with these people who hate me?’ But finally, she gets to get all cute like she did at the mall and go and see her boyfriend, and that’s why I think it was so sad…that’s why we added that small detail of the mascara running down her cheek.
I remember when I first moved to New York, I was walking home and there was this little boy with this lion face paint. And he’s bawling. All I could think was that, at some point in the day, you were having the best day ever, and now you’re just a little crying lion.
It’s so, so sad to me, because you don’t see yourself when you’re going through the pain. Other people do. So when you see somebody that put in a little bit of effort to go on her date, and you see that pain come through…
Eleven’s at a vulnerable age and has certainly been through a lot.
Scars tell a story. Eleven had a scar on her leg from her psychic surgery from the previous season. She’s carrying around this war paint of being a complete superhero. She can still be tender. And I think that’s what I love about our show the most, you can see strong people be weak, and weak people be strong. Everyone has a breaking point, you just have to find it, and everyone has the strength within them. Eddie said, ‘I’m not a hero,’ and look at him. I think that’s beautiful.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Source: Read Full Article
