Latest / The Art of Costume Podcast / The Making of 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story' with Makeup Department Head, Corey Castellano

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The Making of 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story' with Makeup Department Head, Corey Castellano · The Art of Costume Podcast

• 0:14
  I am so happy to be here with today's guest makeup department
• 0:18
  head who oversaw prosthetic design on a Netflix series,
• 0:21
  Monster, the Ed game story. Please welcome Corey Castellano.
• 0:25
  Hi, Corey. So nice to finally meet you.
• 0:27
  Yeah. Nice to meet you.
• 0:28
  Thanks. We were just talking behind the
• 0:30
  scenes, but I mean, this was a doozy of a series.
• 0:33
  I mean, probably I should not watch a lot of these episodes
• 0:37
  that night, but it was expertly done.
• 0:39
  It's the, you know, when it had to be.
• 0:41
  I felt like the makeup and prosthetics were very subtle,
• 0:44
  which added to the storytelling. And then if you're Richard
• 0:47
  Speck, maybe not so subtle. So I really appreciate the work
• 0:51
  you and your team had to do. Thanks very much.
• 0:54
  Appreciate that. Well, with that, I mean, it's
• 0:56
  such a fantastic show. I really enjoyed following along
• 0:59
  with the transformations and integral storytelling, like I
• 1:02
  said. So with that, congratulations to
• 1:06
  you and your team on the Emmy nomination.
• 1:07
  Just had to start with, how does it feel to see your your work
• 1:10
  recognized in this way? It, it's pretty amazing to, to,
• 1:16
  to look at it and, and, you know, realize that people that
• 1:20
  what we did resonated with people.
• 1:21
  And you know, it's, it's always really gratifying because you,
• 1:26
  you never really know what, what's going to happen when you,
• 1:29
  when you do something like that, especially with, with work that
• 1:32
  is actually relatively subtle character type work like the
• 1:37
  aging and the, and the, the hooded lid and that sort of
• 1:40
  thing for Charlie, because those are the kind of things that that
• 1:44
  people will miss. You know, you'll look at it and
• 1:46
  say, oh, that doesn't really look like Charlie, which
• 1:48
  actually happened. We had Charlie was, we had a big
• 1:52
  scene where we were in the skating rink and Charlie was
• 1:57
  talking to a few of the extras and he skated off to go do
• 2:01
  something. And I went by.
• 2:03
  I was just kind of checking all of our background.
• 2:05
  I'm like, oh, yeah, I said Charlie, he was talking to you.
• 2:08
  Oh, that wasn't Charlie. That was his stunt double.
• 2:09
  I'm like, no, that was Charlie. Yeah.
• 2:12
  And it's like, oh, my God, didn't recognize him.
• 2:14
  You know, it's like because they know him as, as you know, yeah.
• 2:18
  Very, very much a leading man. And you know the Jacks from Sons
• 2:23
  of Anarchy, that sort of thing. That is hilarious.
• 2:26
  I can't even imagine. Like you were just talking to Ed
• 2:28
  Gein, so now you maybe understand.
• 2:31
  Now you get it, Yeah. So with that, let's get into it.
• 2:37
  So I'll just be real, you have a huge body of work.
• 2:40
  I was going over your resume this morning, your portfolio and
• 2:43
  over the years you have worked on many different creatures,
• 2:46
  transformations, traumas, I mean, anything you could think
• 2:49
  of really. It's it's on there somewhere.
• 2:51
  I just want to ask you, I mean, what first excited you about
• 2:53
  joining Monster, the Ed Gein story?
• 2:55
  What was about this project where you're like, oh, that
• 2:58
  sounds fun? That, that, that's a good
• 3:00
  question. It was funny because they, my,
• 3:04
  they, my agent brought, brought it to me and said, Hey, they're,
• 3:07
  they're interested in you and said, oh, Ryan Murphy monster
• 3:12
  series. What what are we doing?
• 3:13
  And they said, well, it's Ed Gein.
• 3:16
  And I kind of sat back for a minute because Ed Gein wasn't,
• 3:21
  you know, your normal serial killer.
• 3:23
  If there's such a thing, you know, it's he was more of a
• 3:26
  ghoul. He was digging up bodies and
• 3:28
  doing terrible, terrible things. But, you know, he wasn't
• 3:33
  actively going out killing a whole lot of people, which is
• 3:36
  probably good. But you know, so I was kind of
• 3:40
  curious as to, you know, where the story is in that, you know,
• 3:42
  where the where the drama and that sort of thing is.
• 3:45
  And when I was talking to, to Max, our supervising director,
• 3:50
  Max Winkler, in my initial interview, they were, he was
• 3:55
  explaining what the, the concept was and, and they were showing
• 4:00
  how what influenced Ed and then what Ed did influenced, you
• 4:06
  know, pop culture and media and, and how that all carried
• 4:10
  forward. I thought was a really
• 4:11
  fascinating way to look at, at, you know, just that little slice
• 4:15
  of history. And I was, I was, I was sold.
• 4:19
  I was on board. Yeah, I mean, and we'll get into
• 4:22
  it later, but that little notion really exploded this series into
• 4:26
  taking you all sorts of different places and periods and
• 4:29
  all over the place. So like you said, Ed Gein is one
• 4:32
  of the most infamous figures in American history, at least in
• 4:35
  terms of you're a true crime goer.
• 4:37
  There are a lot of factors that go into this transformation.
• 4:40
  And so with that, how do you approach Koreans, someone
• 4:43
  audiences may or have like, such a mental image of, while still
• 4:47
  serving the story that the showrunners are trying to put
• 4:50
  forward? Sure.
• 4:52
  The for us, the, the big element is not necessarily to bury our,
• 4:58
  our, our actor in, in rubber or anything like that to, to
• 5:03
  achieve, you know, a likeness. It's, it's more important to
• 5:06
  kind of find elements of the, the actual character that we can
• 5:12
  incorporate that will resonate and, and kind of, you know, ping
• 5:16
  on the radar as Oh yeah, Ed Gein had that kind of eye or, you
• 5:20
  know, that, you know, looked this way or acted this way or
• 5:23
  this kind of haircut. And those are the, the, the
• 5:25
  touchstone points that we try to, to build into a look to make
• 5:31
  sure that, you know, that, that there's something that, that,
• 5:36
  you know, evokes the, the actual character without losing, you
• 5:40
  know, for me anyway, without losing our, our lead actor, you
• 5:45
  know, and, and, and a bunch of a bunch of makeup and rubber and
• 5:48
  whatnot. Yeah, I think to me that felt
• 5:51
  very important. It felt like, you know,
• 5:53
  obviously there's a lot going on on his face, which we'll dive
• 5:55
  into in a second, but it was very subtle in the sense that it
• 5:59
  didn't take away from the storytelling at any point.
• 6:01
  You just were able to really. I mean, it's kind of dark, but
• 6:04
  get to connect with Edgy in a little bit and try to
• 6:08
  understand, you know, not what he did but why he did it type of
• 6:11
  situation. I felt like the makeup and
• 6:13
  prosthetics really lended to that.
• 6:17
  But to that point, it's such a dramatic transformation.
• 6:20
  So I was curious what conversations did did you have
• 6:24
  about who who Edguine was and how that need to be reflected in
• 6:28
  his appearance? I know the hooded eye is such a
• 6:31
  such an integral piece to that transformation.
• 6:34
  Yeah, it was that that was probably one of the that in the,
• 6:39
  in the unusual haircut, I suppose were two of the two
• 6:43
  really important elements. And the fact that Ed was
• 6:48
  actually very thin as well. So early on when I first first
• 6:55
  met Charlie, we were about 3:00-ish weeks out from shooting
• 7:00
  and he very boldly announced he was about to lose 30 lbs for the
• 7:04
  role. So that, that that took having
• 7:06
  to do, you know, like contouring off my plate.
• 7:10
  But yeah, I, he, he, you know, the man did it.
• 7:15
  Yeah, I got to give him credit for that.
• 7:17
  But that we were about a week out from shooting and we hadn't
• 7:23
  decided to do the eye. That was something that that
• 7:26
  Charlie kept looking at because Charlie done an enormous amount
• 7:30
  of research on Ed and really, really felt that that would help
• 7:35
  him to to portray the character if we could do something like
• 7:40
  that. And he pitched that to Ryan.
• 7:42
  And Ryan was a little bit unsure, but Charlie convinced
• 7:47
  him to go ahead and, and let us do a test.
• 7:49
  And we did a couple of tests and Ryan turned to me and said,
• 7:55
  yeah, I think that'll work. And so, you know, that was, that
• 7:58
  was a really key element because Charlie was able to use that to,
• 8:04
  to great effect throughout the, the, the, the, the series to,
• 8:09
  you know, look, you know, alternately, you know, kind of
• 8:11
  simple or kind of sad or, you know, just a little turn of the
• 8:16
  head and, and a, you know, just a minute expression.
• 8:19
  And all of a sudden it was a very sinister look.
• 8:22
  And Charlie was able to work with that stuff really, really
• 8:25
  well. He's he was a, he was a dream to
• 8:27
  wear the makeup. So.
• 8:29
  Yeah, it's, it's so fascinating to me how that little note
• 8:32
  really added so much of an emotional factor to the
• 8:34
  storytelling. It, it's so simple, but, well,
• 8:38
  not simple to you, but simple to the viewers.
• 8:40
  But it changes so much when it when you see his character, when
• 8:45
  you have a a character such as a game based on a real life
• 8:50
  person, What sort of research are you in your department
• 8:52
  doing? Are you looking at photos, crime
• 8:55
  scene photos? I mean, what?
• 8:56
  What does that look like for you?
• 8:59
  Yeah, it it all, it all starts on the written page, of course.
• 9:02
  You know, we see what our our writers, you know Ian Brennan,
• 9:09
  you know how he kind of couches things.
• 9:11
  But then once we've got, you know, that framework, we start
• 9:14
  doing our research and we'll, we'll look at, you know,
• 9:18
  newsreel footage, magazines, anything from the, from the
• 9:22
  actual period to, to make sure that we're trying to, we're
• 9:26
  doing our best to capture, you know, whatever we can of the,
• 9:30
  the character, the time period, that sort of thing.
• 9:32
  We were talking a little bit about Charlie being in the
• 9:34
  chair. He carries such a weight in this
• 9:37
  series. I mean, he he's been like almost
• 9:39
  every scene, honestly. And I've been really having a
• 9:43
  good time watching a lot of his interviews because he's done so
• 9:46
  much press for the show talking about just how collaborative it
• 9:50
  was and what was like working with, you know, you and the
• 9:53
  costume designer, production designer, so on and so forth.
• 9:56
  So what makes an actor a great partner when they're spending so
• 9:59
  many hours in the makeup chair every day with you and your
• 10:02
  team? It, you know, it's, it's really,
• 10:05
  it's a combination of things, but you know, it's certainly a,
• 10:10
  a commitment to what we're doing.
• 10:13
  But you know, the, it's, it's not always too easy to, to
• 10:17
  maintain a, a, a, a great attitude when you, when you have
• 10:21
  to, you know, roll in at 5:00 in the morning or 4:00 in the
• 10:25
  morning and, and sit patiently and quietly for an hour, you
• 10:28
  know, while people poke at you. You know, it's, it's I, I, I
• 10:33
  always kind of imagine it's a, a, a bit like going to a, a, a
• 10:38
  dentist that hopefully doesn't hurt you, but maybe a little
• 10:42
  bit. Yeah, but, but no, CC was
• 10:45
  terrific. He would, he would come in and
• 10:48
  he was always upbeat and, and ready to go.
• 10:50
  And he would, you know, sit in the chair and, and we would
• 10:53
  banter a little bit while we were getting started.
• 10:55
  And we were like, we would use a template to line up the eye and,
• 10:58
  and yeah, we just kind of chat, catch up a little bit.
• 11:02
  And then slowly, as, as our work got a little bit more involved
• 11:07
  and we're, we're doing what we need to do.
• 11:09
  And Charlie would start to focus maybe on reading his sides,
• 11:12
  going over lines or very often listening to recordings of Ed to
• 11:18
  make sure that he had the, the, the speech patterns and the
• 11:21
  cadence. So it's, it's very much a
• 11:25
  preparatory period, but, but Charlie was always in it to win
• 11:29
  it. And, and you know, he would look
• 11:31
  at himself. We would place the the eyelid
• 11:34
  and we, we used a template to do it.
• 11:37
  So it would be the same every day, but every day we would do
• 11:40
  the template, put the lid on and then Charlie would take a look
• 11:43
  in the mirror and he would lean in really close and examine it
• 11:46
  and say, Yep, OK, I, I feel good about this one.
• 11:49
  Yeah, just to make sure that it was, it was on.
• 11:52
  And yeah, that that level of participation and, you know,
• 11:57
  positivity throughout what can be a moderately grueling process
• 12:03
  was yeah, was was really great. He was even an absolute champ.
• 12:07
  Wow. And just so the audience
• 12:09
  understands, I mean, how long is that typical processed and did
• 12:12
  it, did it get refined as he went on?
• 12:14
  I mean, we'll get into the aging aspect of gaining a little bit,
• 12:17
  but. Yeah, the, the I I think
• 12:20
  initially took us a little over an hour, maybe an hour, 15,
• 12:24
  something like that, because it's very, very small.
• 12:26
  It's about the size of your pinky and it doesn't go over the
• 12:31
  eye. It kind of tucks up under the
• 12:32
  brow. So there's a whole lot of
• 12:36
  finesse and, and and whatnot to get it to, to land in the right
• 12:40
  spot. And yeah, I think it was about
• 12:43
  about an hour 20 ish the first, the first few times, but we got
• 12:47
  that down to about 45 minutes. And I say we Mark Neiman and I
• 12:51
  would would place the eye, get it tacked in and blend it off.
• 12:55
  And then I would paint and go down that road, I guess.
• 13:01
  Yeah, wow. And I just got to add this
• 13:04
  earlier. You said it earlier.
• 13:05
  I actually kind of like the haircut.
• 13:06
  Is that weird? I mean.
• 13:09
  It's an interesting one. Yeah, that that was our our
• 13:13
  department head for hair, Barry MO and Eric Adams was his key.
• 13:19
  And she was the one that was charged with the maintaining
• 13:22
  Charlie's look throughout. As I understand it, they gave
• 13:25
  him a haircut every day to to try to maintain that that, that
• 13:30
  look. Because Ed, yeah, we wanted to
• 13:33
  maintain a very precise look, but also we were bouncing back
• 13:36
  and forth. We shot half of the show in LA
• 13:40
  and half of the show in Chicago. So, you know, maintaining that
• 13:45
  that continuity was, you know, was paramount.
• 13:49
  So. Right.
• 13:51
  And toward the end of the series, we meet an aged Ed game
• 13:54
  or aging dying at one point, which I assume means the makeup
• 13:59
  evolves with him. So how do you decide what
• 14:02
  change? What changes happened gradually
• 14:04
  versus what needed to be more pronounced?
• 14:07
  Yeah, basically the, you know, our mandate was that we, we
• 14:11
  wanted to age Charlie, but we didn't want to lose Charlie in,
• 14:15
  in, you know, an extreme old age makeup.
• 14:18
  And so, yeah, we, we looked at it and there were, there were
• 14:22
  stages that that we, that we used to, to land there.
• 14:28
  We had multiple prosthetic pieces, forehead, of course,
• 14:33
  the, the, the hooded lid, eye bags, crow's feet and nasolabial
• 14:38
  folds and little elevens as we like to call them.
• 14:45
  And then the, and the hairline, the the wig and the hair, which
• 14:49
  again was Erica handling that. But you know, having a couple of
• 14:54
  versions of that to, to show the, the progression of age and,
• 14:59
  and, and health or lack thereof as, as as it moved along.
• 15:04
  Well, let's actually move on to a few other characters we were
• 15:09
  talking about behind the scenes, but the series finale titled
• 15:13
  Godfather, which is actually the nominated episode, and I see why
• 15:18
  we get to see so many different things in this episode.
• 15:21
  I don't think I was prepared for everything that came together.
• 15:24
  It was packed from Ted Bundy and his victims to dying Ed Gein to
• 15:29
  Buffalo Bill to Leatherface to Richard Speck.
• 15:33
  I mean, this script must have looked insane when you all got
• 15:36
  to see it. It was.
• 15:37
  It was pretty wild. They kept it under wraps for a
• 15:39
  while and then they dropped that script and and, you know, it's
• 15:43
  mind blown, you know, OK. Not even to mention I forgot
• 15:46
  about Manson for a little bit, but you know, we we could go
• 15:50
  all. Day long.
• 15:51
  Yeah, there's a a whole the the ending sequence where he's on
• 15:55
  the the ethereal wheelchair rolling through and he's seeing
• 15:59
  all these different serial killers that, yeah, he
• 16:03
  influenced over the years. It's just, it's pretty wild.
• 16:07
  It's insane. It's like the world's worst
• 16:08
  small world, right? It, it was like, it was
• 16:12
  incredible. So I'll admit this is my first
• 16:15
  introduction to Spec, which sent me down a little bit of a rabbit
• 16:20
  hole last night 'cause I really didn't know anything about this
• 16:22
  person, which I is very shocking to me, being blunt.
• 16:27
  The prosthetics for Spec were almost like another character in
• 16:30
  this specific episode. They had, they had their
• 16:34
  moments. Yeah, yeah.
• 16:35
  So can you walk us through the process of bringing spec to
• 16:38
  life, from your initial research to the final prosthetic design?
• 16:42
  The the breasts for for spec were actually my my friend and
• 16:47
  and with the other prosthetic fellow on on the show, David
• 16:51
  Anderson, actually built those for us.
• 16:55
  And, you know, essentially it starts out with a life cast of
• 16:58
  the the actor and then trying to figure out how best to get those
• 17:03
  sculpted. And then you have to create
• 17:06
  chambers inside to to fill with fluid to get that natural
• 17:11
  movement that that we do see in the episode.
• 17:17
  And we had that our friend Joe Badiyali, who's also nominated
• 17:22
  with us, was the the fellow in charge of that application,
• 17:25
  because it was we had an awful lot going on in that episode.
• 17:29
  And Joe did a terrific job of, of applying that.
• 17:34
  It's literally neck to, you know, just just below the, the
• 17:38
  waist there. It's all, all fake.
• 17:41
  And it's it, it, it's a, it's a huge, it's a huge about a four
• 17:48
  hour application and, and, and a lot of a lot of care.
• 17:52
  And, and I mean, I won't say love, but a lot of care went to
• 17:56
  it. So, so with that, now that the
• 17:59
  audience, now that the audiences have seen the series in the
• 18:02
  whole, and of course now you all have this great Emmy nomination
• 18:06
  with it, what are you most proud of when you look back at the
• 18:08
  work of your department that your department accomplished?
• 18:14
  Wow, there. There's a lot that I'm really
• 18:17
  pleased and proud of. I mean, overall, you know,
• 18:21
  certainly I'm, I'm, I'm really, really pleased with the, the,
• 18:25
  the aging that we were able to do.
• 18:26
  And, and you know, the, the subtlety and that that subtlety,
• 18:30
  I don't want to say it's recognized because it's, you
• 18:34
  know, I, I still get people that, that, yeah, it takes them
• 18:38
  a minute to realize there was the eye or, or the aging, that
• 18:41
  kind of thing. But I think, you know, knowing
• 18:46
  that that these things are important to the story, but not
• 18:55
  intrusive, you know that that's, you know, that's that's the
• 18:59
  thing. But overall, managing to, to
• 19:04
  cover the, the range of the time range, the periods that, that we
• 19:08
  went through throughout the show, whether it was, you know,
• 19:12
  1940s beauty makeup, 50s movie star makeup, recreating scenes
• 19:18
  from Psycho, just the entire body of work was just
• 19:23
  challenging and rewarding to, to be able to, to play across all
• 19:29
  those eras and get to do some prosthetics and get to do all,
• 19:34
  all the things that you train to do as a makeup artist.
• 19:36
  You know, you know, I had a team of great people with me and we
• 19:39
  were all able to to, you know, stretch ourselves and do some
• 19:42
  really cool stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the
• 19:44
  things I love so much about the show, too, was just it felt like
• 19:47
  such an education from learning about your Hollywood history to
• 19:51
  true crime history, learning a little bit, like you said, you
• 19:54
  know, like Hollywood makeup. And it really had a little bit
• 19:57
  of everything. So I imagine it must have been
• 19:58
  such a fun project to be a part of.
• 20:01
  It really was. With that, Corey Castellano,
• 20:04
  thank you so much for joining me.
• 20:06
  This was so much fun. I really love getting to learn a
• 20:07
  little bit more about your process and I'm wishing you and
• 20:11
  your team luck. I'm very excited to see you,
• 20:12
  what you are doing next by the way, too.
• 20:14
  So I'm looking forward to that. Thanks so much.
• 20:18
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• 20:21
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• 20:23
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