Awards Daily talks to makeup artist Louie Zakarian about his Emmy-nominated work on Season 49 of Saturday Night Live.
Saturday Night Live makeup artist Louie Zakarian still can’t believe the viral reaction to Season 49’s Beavis and Butt-Head sketch, with some fans calling for a new live-action movie because of it — even if, after all, it’s not really Beavis and Butt-Head in the sketch.
“That’s the best part,” says Zakarian. “They’re Jeff and Dean. They just happen to look like Beavis and Butt-Head! It would be an interesting movie to see them go from these two guys just meeting to becoming Beavis and Butt-Head.”
After the episode featuring host Ryan Gosling, Zakarian flew out to LA for a day to do makeup and prosthetic work on both Gosling (Beavis/Dean) and Mikey Day (Butt-Head/Jeff) for The Fall Guy premiere, where the two characters made a surprise appearance. Gosling walked the red carpet, came into Zakarian’s tent to become Beavis, went back on the red carpet as “Dean,” and then the makeup and hair team had to clean him up before sending him back out again.
While he had a little more time with Gosling during the movie premiere, SNL has prepared Zakarian to keep everything quick, usually under three minutes.
“Mikey was the fun one, since I knew we’d have a little more time with him. I first came up with those dentures, which were the clincher. They were an Invisalign brace and a little protrusion on the tip of them that made his lips stick out. They did the trick. He didn’t have to hold his mouth open the whole time and could concentrate during the sketch.”
Zakarian says that executive producer Lorne Michaels never wants to lose a cast member or overpower them with something like makeup or hair.
“It’s putting out just enough of that character and keeping just enough of the cast member or host. We’ve gotten really good at finding that happy medium. We have two days to get it all together, so there’s really no time to tweak much of it.”
He’s also at the mercy of the changing scripts. At first, four cast members were supposed to have their faces ripped off in the ‘Scooby Doo’ sketch during the season finale. By Friday’s pre-taping, it turned into just one.
“One of the great things is now we do a lot of things digitally. Everyone gets their head scanned. [For Scooby Doo] I took the scan of James (Austin Johnson) and minimally raised it in scale a little bit so it fit on top of his face and then 3D-printed that so we had a little bit of leeway. On his actual face cast, I sculpted all that shredded face and glued all that on him and made these little Accuform eyeballs to make his eyes look like they bulged out. We had this nice skin that just sat on top of his face, and it was able to set really fast.”
After 30 years of working at SNL, Zakarian has gotten used to working quickly, removing and applying an estimated two to six bald caps per show. However, the one Mikey Day wears in “The Hot Ones with Beyonce” wasn’t his main concern during that particular sketch.
“The first time we did ‘The Hot Ones’ sketch, I was underneath the table, and every time they’d cut back to Maya (Rudolph) and she was sweaty, and I’d pop up, spritz her, and pop back under the table. This time around, they said she wasn’t going to be sweaty, so they didn’t need me. Five minutes before the show, [writer] Steve Higgins goes, ‘We need you to sweat her up! You gotta pop in. We’ll cue you! Pop in, spray her, and pop out again.’ I was like, ‘We haven’t rehearsed it!’ Then, I thought, okay, I’ll do it. If I get caught on camera, I get caught on camera.”
And he didn’t get caught on camera!
As SNL enters its 50th season, Zakarian says he’s already thinking about potential cast members and guests and how he’ll meld them into politicians during this heated election year.
“I’d love to get in Lorne’s head and find out what he’s thinking for this season. Four years ago, we had guests every week to play different people, but these past few years, we’ve been keeping our cast members. When I got the call DeNiro was gonna play Mueller, I was like, ‘I have to do this on DeNiro in a couple of minutes?’ But he was a trooper. Jim Carrey coming in to be Biden. Ben Stiller playing Cohen. Melissa McCarthy as Spicer. It was fun because it kept it challenging. It’ll be nice to see if they keep the cast doing it.”
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