Director Yorgos Lanthimos is known for his erraticism and specific, peculiar imagination. His Best Picture-nominated film “The Lobster” is considered an “absurdist” black comedy that IndieWire called “a surprisingly moving, gloriously weird love story.” His 2019 film with Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, “The Favourite,” is up for a whopping nine Academy Awards this Sunday, including everything from Best Picture to Costume Design. The period piece’s success comes from a glorious blend of incredible casting (Colman has already won the Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Actress for her portrayal of the loony Queen Anne), elaborate wardrobe and writing that tickles your funny bone juuust enough. But achieving the auspicious combination under Lanthimos was a tricky move.
For one thing, he banned hairspray from the set.
“He said, ‘If I see a can of hairspray on the set, I’m going to scream at you,’" hair and makeup designer Nadia Stacey told Deadline of Lanthimos. He wanted to stay true to his vision, which was a period piece...without being a period piece.
Of course, if we’re thinking 18th-century England, we’re picturing big volume, tight curls, everything squeezed and set in its place. But Lanthimos was ambivalent.
“There’s a very specific hairstyle just for that little pocket of time. I started to talk to him about it and he said, ‘I don’t care about that,’” Stacey said. “He loved the movement of the hair in the oil paintings; it’s very freeform, and he wanted me to capture that. He said, ‘I do not want it to look like a standard period drama,’ so he didn’t want lots of curls on top of each other.”
She explained how her challenge was to “make something stylized, with a Yorgos slant on it, but make sure that it didn’t look like you’d got the period wrong.”
Stacey, who won both the BAFTA and British Independent Film Award for hair and makeup production, told Bustle that, usually, directors pass the baton to the hair and makeup team to do what they do best. Lanthimos, though, had an opinion on most details, making “The Favourite” a project that she called the “most incredibly creative” professional job she’s done.
Watching “The Favourite,” though, you can guess what Lanthimos and Stacey agreed on: a minimalist approach to the leading ladies’ makeup. Actually, the men -- especially Nicholas Hoult, who played Earl of Oxford Robert Harley -- are done up way more. The men’s makeup, then, is where Stacey could really focus her craft in the traditional sense.
“The women looked really stripped back, and kind of plain in comparison. It kind of added to that dynamic that suddenly [the men] were all sort of preened and dressed up and beautified, and the women just weren’t,” she said.
Stacey worked with Hoult on the beauty marks that stand out the most whenever Harley is in a scene, being specific about the placement that was era-appropriate. He was also very into his wigs, one of which he named Barbara.
“The different positions on your faces mean different things. If you have one on your cheek, it means you’re feeling bold; if you have one near your mouth, it means you’re married,” Stacey said. “So, Nick and I would sit every day and look at the scene and say, ‘We should do it here now because you’re going to see the Queen.’”
That, to Stacey, was a rewarding, albeit tiny, way to pay tribute to the film’s setting.
“And I know that for 100 people who don’t notice it, there might be one person who noticed it,” she said.
As for the “badger” makeup? Stacey had no idea what the final product was going to be. “I actually hadn’t initially known that it was in the script, so then I had to suddenly start thinking: badger makeup..." she said. "I’ve always loved the make-up on Daryl Hannah in ‘Blade Runner,’ and so that was kind of where it originated. No reference was too bizarre in a Yorgos world!”
And that’s exactly what “The Favourite” is -- Yorgos’s world. He’s a quirky yet brilliant director who makes movies that may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but that no one will quickly forget.
“I think anyone coming into a Yorgos project knows that the rulebook goes out the window, that you are creating something with a particular slant to it and a particular vision,” Stacey said. “I was such a big fan, so trying to piece together what he was going to do with a period drama was obviously so intriguing. Everything about the project was a bit of a dream, to be honest.”