SNL Make-Up and Hair Stylists Explain Creating Trump and Hillary
In this video extra, Saturday Night Live’s hair designer Jodi Mancuso and make-up artist Louie Zakarian talk about their history with Saturday Night Live, and how they design and transform the many looks for SNL cast members generally, and particularly for Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon’s Trump/Hillary characters.
The biggest challenge, they both agreed, is to turn someone into a public figure because the audience looks at them all the time. Right now, there are no figures more public than Hillary and Trump, making the Baldwin and McKinnon transformations a pretty big deal. They have to create wigs, build eyebrows, and sometimes even change the shapes of noses with clips or prosthetics.
The idea to go all in on Baldwin’s Trump came from Baldwin himself. “Alec wanted to go over the top,” Louie said. “He wanted crazy huge eyebrows, huge, arching, over the top. He wanted to be painted orange.” By contrast, hair and make-up barely did anything to change Darrell Hammond for his Trump Character, and Taran Killam’s Trump just required a little paint. Mancuso said that creating the Trump wig was a process with a lot of color choosing. And you have to think about lighting. It took her a full day to get the hair right.
The challenge with changing Kate into Hillary was because Kate is so petite that everything looks gigantic on her and has to be scaled down. Plus, because Kate is used in so many sketches and sometimes even the monologue, everything has to be able to come off very quickly, sometimes in under two minutes.
Watch the video and see how Kate and Alec become Hillary and Donald.
And then vote!
