Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1123465
THE ARTISAN SPRING 2019 • 31 Clockwise from far left: Alison Brie in character as Zoya the Destroya; Betty Gilpin as Debbie Eagan, Ellen Wong as her Fortune Cookie per- sona; Brie and Gayle Rankin get made up; Sydelle Noel, who plays Cherry Bang; Brie gets finishing touches on her hair. All photos by Erica Parise/Netflix, except as noted. Mindy Kaling, as Mrs. Who, receives finishing touches from Kim Kimble and the hair styling team. the characters and their wrestling alter-egos was truly a joy. The cast is so diverse and the actors were enthusiastic about working with us to develop characters that grew from their back stories and who they were going to be. People think we use tons of wigs on this show but for the most part, it's real hair, which makes the project look infinitely better. Right out of the gate, we dyed Kate Nash's platinum hair red and gave Kate and Rebekka Johnson these crazy asymmetrical hairdos that mirrored each other, razor-cut on one side, feathered long on the other. Those aren't easy looks to live your real life in, but they were totally enthusiastic and did whatever was going to help the show. Alison Brie also had really long hair. Her character, Ruth, is an out-of-work actress and very much a plain Jane—until you see her as Zoya. As Ruth, her hair had to be very simple; we modeled it after a photo of Sigourney Weaver in the '80s. We permed Alison's hair and gave her a shag cut. We had a lot of freedom to create their wrestling char- acters. For the most part, Liz and Carly will tell us their ideas for a character in fairly broad terms, like 'Liberty Belle is an all-American girl. We want to see lots of red, white and blue,' and then let us have at it. We cross-referenced the original show and loosely based our ideas on the original characters. Our colors were inspired by the original costumes. We did our rough designs, Beth got us her designs and pictures and we shared ours with her, and we presented back to Liz and Carly. They tweaked here and there, but they're fairly hands off and encourage us to just go for it. The constant on this show is that we have to design everything for the wrestling characters as if it's home- made. These girls are out-of-work actors. They're broke. We're always wanting to go super glam, and Liz and Carly are always reminding us 'they made these costumes We had been working together for 10 years—having met on Matt Weiner's Mad Men. I sent in my résumé for GLOW, and Jenji Kohan, the executive producer, knew Matt, and called us to come in. Theraesa had a few reservations about the looks of the '80s; it was arguably an ugly decade, especially for hair. But she loved GLOW as a kid and was really intrigued by the challenges of this show. We knew it would be a lot of fun and we'd get to come up with cool ideas. When we sat with creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, we got a great sense for their vision, and their approach made us feel like creative partners immediately. We met with costume designer Beth Morgan and started doing what marked all of the work on this show from day one—col- laborating; to a level neither of us had experienced in our whole careers. All through season one—creating the looks for all of