Mike Harvey and Rich Krusell are the Emmy nominated make-up and prosthetic heads on the Prime Video hit Fallout. Based on the celebrated video game, the series imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which survivors of a massive nuclear war live in underground vaults while survivors fight for struggle in the bizarre, barren, and brutal wasteland that has become the surface world. Included in these surface dwellers are Ghouls, half-zombie and half-humans, the most notable played by Emmy nominee Walton Goggins.
Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Harvey and Krusell detail the process of creating characters and creatures of the game while keeping free of direct copies (with one exception). They also reveal the creative and innovative ways they had to work in a high pressure, highly rewarding environment of intense heat, balance of styles, and covering up tattoos.
Awards Daily: One effect I personally liked was Thaddeus’s fast healing foot and the way he was also able to pull an arrow out of his neck. What went into creating those effects?
Mike Harvey: For the foot it was mainly a reference paint job that I did . They expressed a desire to do something digital, because the way we see it on screen there’s possibly no way to do it practically. The arrow, that was pretty much all Rich.
Rich Krusell: The arrow was a prosthetic piece that was added to his neck with I believe a magnet on it to help it come on and off. Then it was a marriage between that and the VFX Department.
Awards Daily: Obviously the most famous makeup job for the show is making Walton Goggins as the Ghoul. What went into creating his makeup job, and how did you make it comfortable for Goggins to walk around in that makeup?
Rich Krusell: The makeup was designed with Jake Garber and Vincent Van Dyke, and Jake was the exclusive applicator of that makeup. Neither Mike nor I was responsible for that. However I can tell you it was a 12-piece makeup I believe which started out being very lengthy and Jake, each time he put it on was able to knock it down, so by the end he got it in just under 2 hours. It was an incredible feat to watch. Anybody who is in that type of prosthetic makeup, especially in the conditions we were in with the heat during the summer, but Walton Goggins is a champ! I wish most people who donned makeup as extensive as his were able to do what he could do. It was challenging and he was up for it!
Awards Daily: Speaking of that heat, I read you guys had to create a certain formula for the blood, dirt, and grease that would hold up under that temperature. What went into that?
Mike Harvey: Some days we had 285 background characters and they all had to be touched, meaning nobody skated through with just an “oh, you’re fine, you look good.” Within the environmental conditions that we were under, whatever we did had to withstand hours and hours of abuse. Not only that, once we put these people through makeup we really didn’t have a lot of time to go back and touch up. Whatever we did had to stay for the day, so a couple of individuals on my team and I came up with the formula for the dirt, blood, and grease. It was a really basic formula that was hair grease and scenic dirt, depending on what we were trying to achieve. It had to be waterproof, it would stay in place, it wasn’t sticky or tacky. With the blood it had to be formulated in such a way that it was almost painted on. Because if people were sweating it would just come right off. Or like when Lucy is dunked in the water over and over again, it would just rinse right off her. So I came up with the paintable version that was waterproof so it would withstand the rigors of everything we had to deal with.
Awards Daily: Over time with a lot of the main characters, especially Lucy and Maximus, they are continually getting more dirty. Lucy even ends up losing a finger and has a different finger on her hand. How did you guys plan that out?
Mike Harvey: Their changes were exhaustively tested. Jonah made sure we had the ideas and the likenesses locked in before we started. He wanted to see a progression of that look throughout Lucy’s journey because she spent a lot of time below ground in a perfect environment, never having to worry about anything. Then getting thrown into this radioactive, hot, dirty world and getting progressively more messed up as she goes. It came down to just the right amount of sunburn, how the radiation was drying her out, getting her dirty, and the blood getting more dry as she went along. At the point when she loses her finger Rich jumped in and painted her finger green so it didn’t show up on the screen. Then, when she enters the Super Duper Mart, or she in turn gets a new finger sewn on, it was a marriage between practical and visual effects.
Then with Maximus, same kind of deal. When we see him at the start he appears to have a history of injuries that we don’t know the full details of. But the idea has been that he has been through something. Jonah wanted to express that in such a way that it didn’t look distracting from Aaron’s face but still said this guy’s been through it. As time passes we see Aaron with his shirt off and he’s got a scar on his shoulder and a scar on his back, which I don’t know if it made it into the final shoot. But we know he has been through something.
Awards Daily: How much did you have to take from the game to give inspiration for the work you did in the show?
Mike Harvey: Right out of the gate Jonah was adamant that he does not want to do a carbon copy of the game. He said, “Use the game as a reference and take bits and pieces from that to develop your characters.” It had to be a character from the game but it couldn’t be cartoony or characterish. Jonah really wanted to feel the real world elements of a person being in an irradiated environment, or this person really was eating human flesh and what that would do to their skin, teeth, and their overall look.
For me, I have played this game intimately for the last 15 years. Anyway, I felt that I had a little bit of an advantage over a lot of us. So I dove right in, and Amy Westcott, the wardrobe designer, kept throwing these awesome creative looks our way. Then there was this one character from the game that Amy dressed almost identically to her. I said, “This is too much of a coincidence,” so I leaned into this character in the game a little too hard, thinking nobody would notice. Boy, people on Reddit noticed; I stood corrected. These fans are hardcore. They knew exactly who that character was and the likeness I was going for.
Awards Daily: Stepping away from the makeup in the radiated desert, what did you guys have to do to create the quasi-1950s look in the past? Did that contrast create new difficulties, or was it just another place that you had to work?
Mike Harvey: It was another lane to play in. They were very strict about making it look like the 50s but not. You could lean into it but they didn’t want to see something that you would say, oh, that’s definitely the 1950s. We came up with the term that it’s like The Jetsons era. It has a retro feel with the clothes and the hair. We had to be very specific about color palettes for eyeshadow and lips because they did not want a modern feel. With Amy designing the costumes and Mitchell Beck with his hair expertise, once you put the pieces together you can see how well it really translated to the screen.
Awards Daily: As someone who may not notice all the details that go into the makeup, what was a particular challenge or something you were particularly proud of in the show?
Mike Harvey: The biggest challenge is also the one I’m most proud of. Ella Purnell for most of the first episode is running around in a wedding dress, and she is personally covered in tattoos. It was an everyday process covering up those tattoos. Amy was very clear that we had one wedding dress so we can’t corrupt this and get make up on it. We can get blood on it when we’re ready. So there was a lot of stress on me just to make certain whatever I did didn’t transfer to the wedding dress. It never did, so I’m going to pat myself on the back for that one.
The other one I’m very proud of is when Lucy is leaving the Super Duper Mart. Prior to that scene ghouls escaped and started attacking everyone in the Super Duper Mart. Lucy has to dispatch the last ghoul that is coming at her. The scene called for her to get a face full of blood and boy, did she! Jonah wanted to keep Lucy’s innocence visible but see what she’s going through still physically on her. She is tired looking, she’s thirsty, she’s irradiated, and now she’s covered in blood. So I had to come up with a paint scheme that didn’t look too gory or gruesome but still made it evident that she went through something where she wasn’t too worried about cleaning up, but did a little. She now has some new armor and a new finger and a gun and is now a badass.
They gave me a big thumbs up about the blood work there, and that blood carried through for three episodes! It had to be painted on. In our world continuity-wise we can make a fake tattoo of a bruise or a cut and just apply it on and it’s done and it’s quick. Every day this needed to be hand painted. Then the tattoo coverage had to come back as well because her vault suit was now damaged so her arm and back were exposed. Then of course there was that darn finger that I had to add, which they promised me would be gone by episode 4 where there’ll be a storyline where it gets healed and it’ll be fine. They ended up not wanting to do that and just kept the finger, so for the entirety of the six episodes beyond that I had to paint that dang finger every day.
Rich Krusell: My challenges were less creative and more logistical. I was just keeping up with the pace of the production, the last minute changes where I was prepared for one thing and then they would throw something at us. Being able to accommodate those changes on the fly, and being able to take the vision of our director and try to bring it to life as best as we could. There were several times we were using our makeup trailer as a lab, where we were creating prosthetics in the trailer, making little molds. Some of those materials were stinky, and then we had an actor and we had to ventilate the trailer before they could come in, so they could breathe comfortably when getting their makeup.
Early on in the filming of the show the first assistant director came up to me and said, “Do you remember when you first started out and we were doing student films and short films and independent films and it was a running gun type of environment?” I was, like, “Yeah?” He said, “That’s what we’re going to be doing here.” So, I was, like, aha! (laughing) It was just one of those things where you had to be ready on the fly and grin and bear it.
Awards Daily: Final thoughts?
Rich Krusell: Props have to be given because it took a village to make this all happen. My department had art designers for the first block, especially Greg Pikulski and Brett Schmidt and their company SPFX Makeup Studio. For the second block we had KNB Effects so we had Carey Jones, Greg Nicotero, and, of course, Jake Garber. He was the glue for our art department, making sure things kept going. I learned a lot from his knowledge and expertise,
Mike Harvey: This show had its challenges, some of which I think have not been achieved before. We are exploring a world that has never been seen in real life before. People on Subreddit who love the game worried about people’s attempts to turn this into something live action that would be mediocre. Everything Jonathan and the writers put on the page me and Rich did everything in our power to bring it to life. I can honestly say it was absolute chaos working in that world. Jonathan edits in his mind as he sees it and he just moves in that direction, and for any of the department heads including Rich and I, it was like a chess match. We had to stay two or three moves ahead of him just to be ready, and he might not even go in that direction. So I can honestly say between Rich, myself, Jake, and the wardrobe department, we never had a chance to sit down. We were always running and gunning, and it obviously shows on the screen all the hard work that all of these people put into this show. The fans ate it up and they want more, and I know right now the team is developing season 2 faster than they developed season 1.
Rich Krusell: I will say this working so hard and being in the trenches, (not to say that we didn’t have the vision of what we were doing), but a lot of us were just doing it and we didn’t get a lot of sleep at times, and people got disgruntled and morale wasn’t as high as it could be. But when they gave us that sizzle reel of the early cut of a trailer, the next day everyone had a pep in their step because we got to see the fruits of our labor in real time. We thought we were onto something special here. It was great to have that vision of what was to be.
Fallout streams exclusively on Amazon Prime Video.
