Inside the Hair and Makeup Transformations of Showtime's 'The First Lady'
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The key was getting granularly down to the details, Rasheed says, studying images and footage from the lives of the women being portrayed and noticing. “It could be something as simple as how their lipstick was applied to ‘were their brows thicker this year or thinner in another year?’” she says. “Those little nuances are what really help develop a character to fullness.
“The scene where Viola is at a photo shoot with the now historic black-and-white dress—Ms. V embodied Michelle,” Anthony says. To nail this embodiment, “research was key to accuracy,” Wilson says. “I did a lot of Google searches to study the hairstyles of Michelle Obama over her eight years in the White House. Each style has its own identity, and it was important to re-create the styles with accuracy.” It’s a transformation Anthony calls “magical.
Kendrick used five wigs for Mrs. Roosevelt, which “helped provide the passage of time through the different decades of changing fashions, which Eleanor Roosevelt did a lot—she very much moved with the times,” she says. “Gillian is a very petite, glamorous actress, and Eleanor Roosevelt was larger than Gillian. Therefore, we needed to create more of a square shape with her look within the wig dressings.”“The transformation with her was so amazing,” Rasheed says.
To make the look happen, Pfeiffer wore false eyelashes for the younger years, but none for the older Mrs. Ford. “I changed the shape of Ms. Pfeiffer’s nose slightly to resemble Betty’s more prominent nose and narrowed her lips to resemble the shape of Betty’s mouth,” O’Reilly says. “I also had her eyebrows darker and thicker for the younger years, and lighter and sparser for the aging Betty.
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