Interview: How the Hair and Makeup Wizards Behind ‘Weapons’ Created a Lasting Icon in Aunt Gladys
The world of horror movies is filled with iconic villains brought to life through extensive makeup and unique hair. Freddy Kreuger, Pennywise, the Phantom of the Opera, and hundreds of other creepy creations live on well past their film’s theatrical runs thanks to their singular looks. Of course, the actors that portray them are a huge reason for their success, but credit must be given to the hair and makeup teams that design, create, and ultimately apply their extensive work onto the performers.
Amy Madigan’s spectacularly unsettling performance as Aunt Gladys in Zach Cregger’s horror blockbuster Weapons is rightfully getting awards buzz. Her physical and vocal choices are unnerving as hell, and her characterization is only helped by Gladys’ off-putting, bizarre hair and makeup. Nearly everyone who sees the film has the same reaction when she enters the movie over an hour into its runtime – a combination of “what the hell am I looking at?” and “I’m so excited for whatever’s about to happen.”
Her striking, clownlike makeup and uncanny hair are the creation of special makeup effects designer Jason Collins, makeup department head Leo Satkovich, and hair department head Melizah Wheat. The trio of craftspeople had a wide-ranging chat with us about the creation of Gladys, what it was like working with Amy Madigan, and how wonderfully strange it was to see so many people recreating their work on Halloween.
Suffice to say, very full spoilers, both written and visual, for Weapons follow.
Cody Dericks: Thank you so much for talking with me today, I’m really excited to talk about this incredible film. I’ve seen it a few times now, I know I’m probably not alone in that, judging by the response it’s gotten. Since its release, so much of the conversation around the film has revolved around the incredible character of Aunt Gladys, both Amy Madigan’s fantastic performance and the generally, let’s say, striking look of her. I want to know about the process of constructing her visually. So, the hair and the makeup – was a lot of that pulled from the script? Leo, let’s start with you.
Leo Satkovich: Zach Cregger gave us a pretty broad blueprint when it came to designing Aunt Gladys. So, I do have to say that Aunt Gladys was truly a labor of love between Zach Cregger, Trish Summerville the costume designer, Melizah, Jason Collins, and myself. The script gave us a broad outline in the sense that it said that she had very gaudy makeup, bright red hair, her makeup was almost clown-like. So, it was very open-ended, and our imaginations just ran with it. Trish Summerville was working with Zach for probably about maybe a month before us. So, she had about a month head start, which was a great foundation for us. She started putting her in these super colorful pantsuits and these really colorful trainers. So, it was a really great place for us to start.
And then talking with Zach and Melizah and Jason, as far as her beauty makeup goes, we know that we wanted to land somewhere between Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, really took inspiration from Mink Stole, Pink Flamingos. Zach Cregger gave us inspiration through Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman, just really playing with forced perspective. Then when Jason and I started talking about her physical attributes and what we wanted to do, we knew that we did not want to cover her face in prosthetics. Amy was cast for Aunt Gladys for a reason, so we wanted to keep as much of Amy as possible. So, Jason just designed these really beautiful pieces that just accentuated the parts of Amy that we wanted accentuated. At the end of the day, we wanted Amy to wear the makeup for Aunt Gladys, we didn’t want the makeup to wear Amy, if that makes sense. Because Aunt Gladys is such a big character in herself, we felt like it was pretty unnecessary. So, it’s really been wild to see just how much this whole look has been received.
We knew we wanted to go with a very messy red lip. At the end of the day, we wanted her to exude confidence, and she wore this look like she was the deal. No one could tell her anything. And it was very period ambiguous. We wanted Gladys to feel like she could have come from any period. So, we went with the powder blue eye shadow that was very big in the late ’40s, ’50s. We went with that red lip of the same time period. We went with a graphic squiggly liner, it was a little bit more indicative of ’60s, late ’60s, and just a super chunky mile high mascara. We would put on just a few individuals, and we would just go to town on layering them. Sometimes she would have about 10 layers of mascara on. So to everyone else, it was just this crazy makeup. But to us, it was something that was meticulously designed and finessed everyday so that she did look like that. The eyebrows, it was so much more difficult and challenging to do these fucked-up eyebrows than to do really pretty eyebrows, because everything that you’re trained to do as an artist is to make them look symmetrical and nice. So, what we had to do is I actually designed them in a design program, and I turned them into really faint tattoos, and then we would put them on after the brow blockers, and that was our foundation for the eyebrows. Then we would go back in, and I would put on the brow powder, and just make them really messy. I think the fun part was knowing that there was a purpose for everything with her makeup.
CD: Jason, I’ll toss it right to you. Can you tell me what your process was like in building her as a character?
Jason Collins: I mean, obviously, it was a great collaboration between these two individuals and Trish Summerville’s costume design. What’s Gladys without her wardrobe as well? So, going off of this trifecta of all of us working together to try to narrow in on her exact look. But early on in the conversations, we knew that she was going to have multiple stages that you see her in, and she really only is in a third of the film if you really think about it. So, those stages that she’s in have to be really impactful and have to tell the story. We first see her, she’s old and decrepit, and then she’s starting to come back to health, but it’s all told out of order. So, in order for us to wrap our brains around it, I think we really had to get this idea of what Zach was after, which was this crazy eccentric aunt that comes to visit that is creeping out the kid, but also somebody that can turn on a dime, and turn into this vicious animal, and somebody that would really scare the bejesus out of you.
That’s not an easy line to walk with a character like Gladys. There’s a lot about the character that walks up to the line of camp but doesn’t really cross the line. So, it has that absurdity and craziness, but then there’s these other moments where it just turns into this really, really vicious character. For that to bring that viciousness out, one of the things we were early talking about, instead of doing the old trope of a witch, where it’s all the hag stuff and the crazy nose and all that stuff, is to give her this identity of a bird of prey, somebody that really had this notion in them that they were a hunter. In order to do that, what we did was we gave her a bit of a nose that had a little bit of a hook and more of a beak, if you will. So when you saw her from the side perspective, it gave her this profile of having this beak, but it was really just much more of a powerful nose, a substantial presence to the nose.
Then we narrowed down her pupil using contact lenses. What that helped us do was really narrow in to get that bird of prey. Now when we first did it, we did both of her eyes, we were going to do both of her eyes like that. I think me and Leo, we tried one to Amy, and showed Zach, and Zach was like, “No no, let’s just do one, because it’s so fucking weird.” It’s so odd. You can’t ever find your grounding with one eye. I thought that was a great call.
One of the last things we did, well, we did two other things. One was we extended down her ear lobes, which elongated her head a little bit more, but it also served the purpose that you see a lot of those older women that have been wearing dangly earrings their entire life. So, it served that purpose as well as elongating the head.
Then we did these teeth, and the teeth had these little nubs to them, and you can feel like they were bird teeth if you looked at them. We call them baby teeth as well. There’s actually a gum disease out there where people produce way more gum. I came across some images like that, and I thought, “Oh, that’s something interesting to work with.” So, we started flexing around with all of this stuff. Originally in our test, we did these stained teeth. We did the hero teeth, what became the hero teeth, just on a lark here. We’re fucking around, and we’re like, “Oh, let’s try these. Let’s see if these work.” Then we brought them, and we threw them in, and everybody right then and there was like, “That’s it. Those teeth are terrifying.” So, there’s just something unsettling about it, but at the same time, it serves the dual purpose of the ridiculousness but also the ferocity. That’s a really, really hard line for all of us to walk with this film, but I think it accomplished it, because the film is like that as a whole. There’s all these absurd moments. There’s always really terrifying moments. I think that that is what gets under your skin. So, we really had to design Aunt Gladys in a way that it would really unnerve people and creep up on them and get under their skin. At first, she’s just this crazy old lady, and then she turns into this ferocious person who will make your parents eat each other alive that she wanted to.
LS: To give the illusion that she was bald, to give her more of a hairline every day when she was in the wig, we put in half bald cap pieces just to extend that hairline, to give the illusion that she didn’t have anything under the wig. It was almost like every stereotypical characteristic that you want in a terrifying horror villain, we did the exact opposite.
JC: That was the fun thing about what he’s bringing up, was because Melizah realized that if she brought the wig up just a little bit, it was a little bit more uncomfortable, like a wig that wasn’t fitted properly for somebody’s head that was just plopped on and sitting there. So when you get profiles, it really reads effectively. It’s one of those cool things, but Melizah could talk more about that.
Melizah Wheat: Well, I tell you what, everything that these two have said is pretty much right on the head. I think that as far as the wig and landing on a certain look, it was a little bit gradual. We tested different lengths of wigs. They were all shoulder-length and some shorter ones, different types of reds, different tones of red. We finally landed on something great, but it was the fine-tuning that made it feel right. It was the collaborating with the team that helped us mold her into the right place. It was just really interesting, for instance, the ear lobes, and we wanted the wig short enough to where you could see her earlobes. Of course, bringing that wig back just gave her that unstable like, “Who’s this woman?” She has no idea how to put a wig on. What’s going on under there?
There was a lot of mystery. It’s just disturbing. It’s kinda sad, but also, she owned it, and she was very powerful in it. When she’s at the school talking to the principal, and when she was wearing that hero look, it seemed like she was very proper, and she had her pearls on and her brooch and her handbag. She was fierce, but she was very, very mysterious. Even when I read the script and we were filming, I questioned, “Is she really related to them? What if she’s not?” Because they haven’t seen her in a while. What if she’s not related to them? We just think they think she is. It even had my mind thinking about those things. It was just so many things.
CD: Right. The age difference of it all.
MW: The process was great. The process was great, I got to say.
CD: Well, Melizah, I also want to ask about one specific scene. It’s a nighttime scene where she’s speaking with her nephew, and she has these really striking little braids.
MW: The braids.
CD: Tell me what’s going on there.
MW: I learned on the day, the braids were not planned. Like the iris or the contacts, it was a very spontaneous decision on Zach’s part. But, they had the pieces made. Jason, do you want to take this one? Because your team, they did these amazing pieces for her head, the bald caps, and did all the hair. You got this one.
JC: Essentially, we do these bald caps in two pieces. That helps us to manipulate, get it onto the head a little easier and find everything to have its place. In order to get that wispy hair to see through to her scalp and everything, that it’s more than what would normally happen because there’s something that’s creepy about being able to see all the spots on our scalp and all those things. You can’t really place it. Is her hair just falling out? Is she just old? Is it chemo? I mean, what is it? What’s going on?
MW: What’s happening?
JC: It flows into that supernatural aspect. So, we punch all the hairs one by one by one by one. So, somebody spends three or four days literally punching each hair into that cap, into both sides of that cap. In order to get that cap on their head without all that hair getting in your way while you’re gluing, we have to tie them up in braids. We have a wonderful hair artist here in Elisa Boyce who preps all of my things for me. When we’re getting ready to ship these things, she will take the braids and put them into segments. So, that allows me to flip braids up. Me and Leo can go crazy, glue the sucker down, flip the braids down, and then when we’re done, we’ll undo all of the hair. So, it’s all long and scraggly.
Well, Zach came in mid-application. He saw the braids and he was like, “Is it going to look like that,” not in an accusatory tone, but a really worried tone. I was like, “No. No. No. No. We have to take these down.” This was literally on the test day. We have to take these down. He was like, “We got to use those somewhere, man, because that’s just fucking weird.” I was like, “Really?” He was like, “Yeah. Yeah. No, anything that we can do to make her unsettling every time we see her, she looks a little bit different and a little unsettled.” So, we walked her over before we took the hair out, and just photographed her, and did the screen test with the braids in. I think all of us were like, “Yeah, that’s fucking weird, man. That’s fucking weird. It’s really strange. That works really well.”
Then Melizah undid all the braids, and brought the hair down and everything, then we got our moments with the hair down. But there’s a lot of things, when you’re doing things like this and when things are really successful, you have a process of discovery. You have a process of happenstance, where everybody’s working together. They’re trying to figure this thing out, and you stumble upon these amazing happy accidents that are arbitrary and strange, and they lead into the overall design, what you’re trying to do. Then you go in, and you refine all of those things. Without that process of discovery or stumbling upon those things, I mean, you might as well have an AI-generated image. It’s just giving it prompts. I mean, this is real life emotion, real life.
People have different eyes that are looking at the same thing. They all see things differently. It’s really about a collaborative art. That’s the thing that I love about what we do with makeup and hair and everything is that we don’t do it in a vacuum. We do it together. That’s with the actor, with the director, with all of us. I think that without those happy accidents, we wouldn’t have that creepy, creepy moment when the kid walks in, and she’s sweaty, and she’s really not doing well, and it really, really makes you uncomfortable. I saw the movie again last night on the big screen, and I was like, “Fuck, that really does work. It does make you uncomfortable, really, really, really uncomfortable.” So, happy accidents.
CD: It’s also, strangely, her most humanizing moment. She feels almost pitiable in that one moment. I don’t know if it’s entirely the hair or the performance or something, but what came together there is really surprising.
JC: Yeah. It’s also the way that Zach lit the scene, and it’s got this really sort of warmth to it. Mainly when you see Gladys, she’s in a lot of cold light. She has a lot of harsh light. That’s the first time you really see her, and that light is really warm and everything. So, I think that that makes her vulnerable, like you’re saying.
CD: Well, speaking of collaboration, you had an amazing canvas to work with with Amy Madigan, who gives, obviously, an incredible performance. I’d love to know what it was like working with her. Leo, let’s start with you.
LS: She is a true, tough-ass Midwestern woman. She’s as genuine as it gets, and the kindest soul, the kindest soul. She is smart. She’s intelligent. She’s sharp as a tack. She has no problem telling you how it is, and she gives so much in her job. She gives so much of herself to her profession that she expects the same out of everyone else around her. We were all so passionate about this character that all of us, me, Jason, Melizah, Trish, we all gelled so well with Amy because we were all so passionate about this, and we all really appreciated each other. As far as the makeup and application goes, Amy could have sat in the chair for five hours. If it meant that it was going to be a beautiful product, she didn’t care. She never complained once. She never complained once.
All of that running and everything was Amy Madigan. We got her stunt double ready every day, and she was like, “Honey, thank you. I really appreciate you being here, but I think I got it.” She’s just such a professional, and she’s so appreciative of all of the artisans that are working around her. At the end of the application, she’d be like, “How do I look?” I’d be like, “You look fucked up.” And then she’d walk out of the trailer, and it’s like, “bam.” The second that she sees the makeup and the wig go on, she’s Gladys, and you just see this instant change in her that she’s so happy to be able to do this character, and look the way that she did, which is exactly what we wanted. We wanted her to use this hair and makeup as a prop for her performance, and you just saw this light immediately turn on when she saw it all come together.
All of us still talk to her. She’ll text us every now and then, be like, “Did a great article for the New York Times, a lot about hair and makeup, looks amazing. Love you guys. Talk about you guys in the interview.” Just little things, “Give my love to Justin and the dogs, xoxo Amy.” I mean, it was just a really, really, really special thing to work with someone like Amy Madigan. She deserves all the accolades that she’s getting now and more.
JC: She’s really great. I think we all realized that the Gladys character really needed to work. That whole crux really depended upon that working. I think that Amy knowing that and coming into it was 100% receptive to everybody’s ideas. She had her own ideas, of course. Her and Zach had communication about what she should look like or how she should feel, but she knew that was going to be a process. So the first time that she came into my studio, she was game, and we did multiple scans and different positions, so we can do some Photoshop stuff, all that kind of thing. We started talking about teeth. We started talking about lenses, and she was just game for all of it, and wanted to see how far we can push the character, because she’s one of those classic physical actors that use everything to their ability that they have in their physical performance.
I think that her being able to utilize us as tools was really helpful in her finding the pulse of Gladys, because again, Gladys had multiple layers as you went down into the movie, and you saw the sub-basement layer of where she lived, really, that parasite that she is. So, that was really cool. I tell everybody over and over again, it was our summer vacation movie, because I just felt like it was a joy working with these people, it was a joy working with Amy. It was just one of those things where I don’t really have much negative at all in any way, shape or form. It was such a positive experience. Getting to build a character and to see its reception everywhere is crazy. I go down this rabbit hole on Halloween looking at all these people in all these crazy costumes, and I’m just like, “That’s amazing. That’s really, really cool.” All of these were just all of our crazy random ideas a year and a couple of months ago, just back and forth. “Is that ridiculous? Is that stupid? Nope.”
LS: They really were. We’d just be sitting around, we would all talk for hours about these things, and it would literally just be one of those things that you’re like, “What if she had a baby bang or really sharp pointy teeth, terrifying teeth that come out sometimes?” Then she’s like, “But also, Chiclet teeth are really disturbing.” It’s an artist’s dream, and it’s almost like we had carte blanche, and Zach would just say, “Yay, nay, or I would like to see more, or absolutely not.”
MW: He’d say, “Perfect. It’s perfect.”
LS: Yes. It was an artist’s dream.
MW: It was really cool. I think a big part of the process was, I think for myself and my team and the makeup team, for all of us, there was a big layer of trust. Even with Amy, she sat in my chair, and she never questioned anything. She would take a nap. And it was just a really beautiful transition when she would go see makeup. Then when she came to me, it was like the crown was put on, and she walked in as Amy Madigan, and left 100% Gladys, and she was ready to shine. Again, the trust was huge. It was just endless. It was the little things that made a difference. It was great, because we were all receptive to each other’s opinion and like, “Well, what do you think about this?” You don’t find that too often, and it’s really incredible. I am forever grateful to these two brothers that I have in my life.
JC: It’s rare you still like everybody when you’re done but-
MW: Oh, man. It was just like, “It’s going to be tough, you guys.” But it was great.
LS: It’s pretty cool too how Amy…how dedicated she was to preserving the magic. There are no BTS of Amy on set. There are no stills. The only photos that you see online are from our camera rolls. It was so important to her to protect this character for us, for Zach, for the film, for herself. Just seeing her dedication was really amazing, and it really, really paid off in the end.
CD: Well, part of what makes her character so striking is that, as far as I saw, she wasn’t really in the marketing.
LS: At all.
CD: So when she pops up an hour into the movie, you’re like, “What the hell am I looking at here?”
LS: Yes. Yes. That was by design from the beginning.
JC: That’s what’s so amazing in this day and age that they could do that, that they kept that under lock. So, I think that to be able to pull that off in this day and age is extraordinary that people didn’t know that she was in it. They had test screenings. That’s how they knew that it was doing so well. People didn’t leak any of that online. I mean, how do you keep a secret that she’s a witch until you see the movie? I don’t think hardly anybody knew that before they saw the film. I think it’s a testament to Amy, like Leo said, which is absolutely no behind the scenes, no interviews, no anything. Then I think WB ran with it at the end, which was like, “We’re just going to not talk about it,” and that was for Zach. We’re not going to talk about Gladys until a couple weeks until the movie’s out, so people can really enjoy it and immerse themselves. That’s the wonderment of filmmaking, right? It’s like you get a surprise when you watch the film. This day and age, I mean, in every trailer, you see the film before you go and watch it.
LS: I don’t even need to see the film anymore. I saw it all in the trailer.
JC: I don’t even need to see the film anymore, but I think that’s the success of Weapons, really, is the fact that they can keep it a mystery. Tonally, the film is not anything you could put your finger on, as is Gladys. She’s not anything you could put your finger on. That’s what allows everybody to have that mental landscape inside of their head to play with the concept of Gladys. Where did she come from, and where is she going? Is she really dead, or is she going to show up in another iteration? You just give them just enough for their own imagination to start working, and that’s cool.
CD: Horror is really built upon these iconic screen images, these characters. Did you get the sense when you were creating Gladys that you were possibly building something that would become – and I think we can confidently say already is – an iconic horror character, or was this just another day at the office?
LS: No, I think we knew we were creating something special. But I, for one, I mean, Jason has done much more of this, the villain building stuff and everything. He may have seen it coming. I had no idea, and I’m still processing it. It’s wild.
JC: Generally, I’m just trying not to get sued.
MW: It’s true. It’s bizarre. It’s really bizarre. People getting Gladys tattoos, it’s like, “What?” Those bangs…
LS: Never would’ve thought.
MW: It’s pretty cool.
JC: I don’t think anybody really ever thinks that. I mean, I sit down with a lot of directors and the instant they start talking about wanting to create a new horror icon, which is always sort of the death knell, because then you’re like, “All right, you’re going to be chasing a ghost.” You can’t design that. The film has to work. The characters have to work. People have to love that. So when you actually start to do something like this, all you’re trying to do is serve the story. If you serve the story and the story is successful, then that’s when that stuff is born and bred.
You can’t sit at a table and say, “Oh, we’re going to create the new horror icon.” Believe me, I’ve sat across the table from 20 directors saying the same thing, and it doesn’t work because inevitably, they fall into the same tropes. It’s like you’re just creating what people already know, and Gladys is a completely different left field character. You have investment in the characters. You have investment in her. You have investment in the little boy. I mean, just the way that everything is told when she comes to take away what she comes to take away, that’s when she becomes the villain. But is she a villain really?
LS: Justice for Gladys.
JC: Yes. I was listening to Amy talk yesterday. They did a little thing here in L.A. with her. She said, “Is she really a villain?” Because if you think about it, Amy didn’t really hurt anybody, or Gladys didn’t really hurt anybody. I was like, “Ah, that’s a good point.” She just made everybody else do it.
CD: She’s just breaking sticks.
MW: The peeler, the forks.
LS: This film’s so cool because you can’t manufacture lightning in a bottle. It’s just the perfect storm of all the most ideal elements to create this monstrosity of a hit, I don’t believe it’s anything you can plan for. It’s just hard work, passion, and love for the creation of something like this. Then sometimes it pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. I believe we’re all happy to say that it’s really, really amazing to see that it paid off.
JC: Yeah. I read a lot of people’s comments on Instagram and everything. There’s a lot of horror people out there that just like these depraved films, I call them gore porno films. It’s like, “That movie wasn’t scary. That’s not a horror film.” You always know you hit a nerve when you’ve got people who really love it and people who…They don’t hate it, but they just don’t…“It’s not a horror film. It’s not a horror film.” You’re like, “Okay. So, we hit a nerve somewhere in there because we found that true bliss of bringing in a new audience to experience this.” It’s not the people that are going to watch Terrifier all the time. No slam to Terrifier. Terrifier is its own animal. It’s a different breed of horror. People do love that, but this is bringing everybody in to the campfire to tell the story.
CD: I’m not recommending Terrifier to my mom like I was with this movie.
JC: No. No. No. No shade to Terrifier. I mean, it certainly feeds its audience.
CD: Has its place.
JC: Has its place for sure, but I like this stuff. This stuff’s a little bit more of a heady horror to me. That’s where I like to live.
CD: Well, obviously, Aunt Gladys is getting a lot of the makeup attention and hair attention when discussing this film, but that’s not the only work you did on the film, I imagine. So, I’d love to hear about other hair and makeup work that got done on the film. Melizah, how about you?
MW: Well, we had Julia Garner, our teacher, who had a great head of hair. I just designed her haircut just to have a little bit of an organic feel to it. She doesn’t put too much time into herself. So, I didn’t have anywhere to go, so to speak, because of the color and it being the texture that it had. I was able to push the limits a little bit at the end of the movie when she’s getting attacked and she gets sweaty, and it’s just a little more elevated. But for the most part, it stayed in a simple outline. We had the parents that, alongside their forks in their face, Alex’s parents, we had a nice graduation of decay and distorted visuals of the timeline where they start simple and happy and fresh and like regular parents. Then you can see the level that it goes to as they are impacted by their possession, so to speak.
CD: The mom really needed a brush.
MW: Yeah. No, totally. It was a really interesting thing to decide at what level, because we tested again with Zach, how far he wanted to go. Then we had to kind of bridge the looks, because clearly, everything’s connected and disconnected equally. So, it was really nice to push the envelope with that really crazy hair. Then you got your quintessential cop hair. There wasn’t too much room for creative design on that. It was just sweet, but everybody, the whole cast was just amazing and really kind. So, we were able to just do the most creatively. We pushed the envelope as much as we could without it going campy or anything or too heavy. All the light was on Gladys’s variation of her wigs, the nightmare wigs. She had different wigs for different times in the movie. Some of them were lighter. Some of them were crimped and brighter. That was a cool thing to bring to the table to keep it interesting and to accommodate the lighting and the tone of the film.
CD: You’ve got to diversify your wig options, anybody’ll tell you that.
MW: We have rotations. It was just quite a bit to wrangle, but it was good. It was good. The cast was great.
CD: Jason and Leo, how about you? What other makeup work stood out to you besides Aunt Gladys, while you were working on it?
LS: Like Jason was saying earlier, Zach really took this up to the line of camp. I really love that he broke those standard formulaic horror movie tropes, and he really brought you up to the line of camp before jerking you back with something extremely disturbingly jarring that put you right back in your seat, and wiped that smile off your face. To really sell that, the makeup had to be extremely grounded and rooted in reality. So, as far as the beauty makeup goes, everything was very minimal. It was very rooted in reality. If anything, we pushed the character makeup more. So, Julia just had a very light beauty makeup on.
Then, like Melizah was saying, every character had their own arc, and we would start to break them down or bring them back up wherever they needed to be within the story. So, whether it meant adding dark circles under Julia Garner, as she progressively becomes a little bit more manic and trying to figure out what’s going on. She’s drinking more. She’s not sleeping, so we add some color under her eyes. She lives in this sheen look, like she’s not really taking care of herself the whole film. Whereas Josh Brolin, we gave him a little bit of a tan, he’s a contractor. Austin Abrams, who plays James, was really, really fun to design. It was super cool just because he does play this unhoused addict. So, Jason made some great teeth for him. I designed, printed some tattoos for him, just gave him some just pick marks on his skin in various parts of his body, because we see him shirtless. Then he also lives in the majority of the movie in that swollen eye. We really just wanted to pull that back. We didn’t want that to take the front seat. It was really important that that didn’t overshadow his character.
As far as the parents go, the parents were super fun to design and build. Zach Cregger personally pointed out where he wanted every fork stab. Then Jason made those into these prosthetic transfer appliances that we would put on every day. Then my [key makeup artist] Mark Ross and [makeup artist] Kaylee Swisher would be responsible for those characters, and they did everything from their beauty. They would, from there, just gradually break them down until you finally see them at the end, at their worst. Then their scabs have turned a little gangrene. It’s a little gray, and they have red around their eyes because you don’t know if they sleep. Do they just shut down? Do they deactivate? What goes on with them? They’re under the spell, but their bodies are very much clearly still alive. So, it was really trying to find that medium between being alive but still decaying in your own body, and not being able to do anything about it, and then [makeup artist] Jennifer Denise Bennett, that oversaw all of the kids. That was her job, which was a huge job, wrangling all those children and making sure that they look grimy and sweaty, making sure that they have just the correct layers of soup that they needed on their body depending on where they are in the story.
I don’t want to say it was a nightmare, because it was actually kinda fun tracking the continuity. It was just one big puzzle, and the continuity were just all these puzzle pieces that all fit together at the end to create a really cool visual story.
JC: We had a few key moments that we did when Principal Marcus attacks Terry and starts to bash his head in. We made the three different stages of heads attached to these bodies that we can just get in and take out and put another head on, because ideally what Zach wanted to try to do is everything in one shot. We knew that Benedict [Wong] was going to be bashing his head over and over again into the dummy. So, we didn’t want to have any hard pieces in it. So, the teeth are silicone. The eyes are silicone. It’s like hitting a great big pillow. Cosmetically, we just had to make sure it looked like the actor to a T, which it did. Then we would bash their head gradually. So, the next head was bashed in a little bit more, and the next head was bashed in a little bit more. I’d get in, and we’d change those heads out, and gore it up. In the end, Zach chose not to use it all as one swoop shot, I thought was interesting, because he cuts to Amy who’s cleaning up her mess, which I thought was way more impactful than seeing somebody completely get their head caved in. But, you did see the after effects of it and everything when they leave.
The other things that we had to do besides the fork stabs and things like that, there are some pieces with Alden [Ehrenreich]’s character where she takes a veggie peeler to his face, which is a great moment. The theater, everybody seems to… I relived it last night, and all I wanted to do is get up and tell everybody, “Have you not seen this fucking movie yet,” to everybody in the theater, but apparently, it got a lot of people, and they were screaming when they saw it. So I was like, “Okay, that’s great.” That veggie peeler thing was a really tricky thing to do, because we had to do what’s called piggyback appliances, and that’s a little cheek appliance that has the pieces already taken out. Then we create other pieces that plug right into that. So on camera, she can actually peel his face. That gets a little tricky because we also had to try to find a veggie peeler, at least props did. They were having a hell of a time, so we made one, a veggie peeler that would be wider at the top so that it would take out more skin and be more effective on screen. I thought, “Nobody’s going to know that I made that veggie peeler,” and I still have it in a box up there somewhere, which is great.
But, the other things that we had to do were she shoots Alden in the neck with his gun. That’s a whole neck appliance that’s just gushing out blood, which is pretty effective in the theater. It’s actually a pretty sad moment too, I think, when she shoots her former lover, and kills him. And then obviously, the exit wounds in their heads. Principal Marcus gets nailed by that car. We made a body. It’s funny because I did a couple of concepts and sent them over to Zach, and I was like, “Zach, we got to have him have his shoe off. There’s always something creepy when somebody gets hit by the car, and the shoe is off in the road somewhere. There’s something so disturbing about that.” We wanted to make sure that the body was twisted in such a way. So, that was really fun and impactful for people to really see it. Cross combination of him getting hit digitally by the car, and then Archer coming up and seeing the remains on the road.
LS: Jason.
JC: What?
LS: You’re forgetting the best part.
JC: What was that?
LS: The end.
JC: Oh shit, yeah! I totally forgot about that. We made this body, obviously, of Gladys that gets pulled apart by the children. The body was tricky. It was a little bit of an engineering marvel, because we knew that we couldn’t afford multiple bodies. We didn’t have the timeline, and we also didn’t have the budget. It wasn’t a huge budget film. So, we said, “All right, well, we’ll have to have a resettable body.” So, that gets a little tricky, but we were able to do it with cable pulls and socket locks so that when the kids draw and quarter the body, they can all go back together again. The head, sort of, coup de grace, as the head gets pulled apart, that also sleeves back into itself again.
So, it was a bit of an engineering marvel. It took us a minute to figure that out. But once we did it, it was pretty cool. We shot that two or three times, I think, mostly because wrangling children isn’t the easiest thing in the world on a 100 degree, 90 degree, 90% humidity Georgia day, where everybody’s sweating and trying to wrangle these animals to do it. But, we were also all worried that we were going to fuck these kids up for life, because they’re pulling apart an old lady.
CD: Kids love that kind of stuff.
JC: We were all worried about the psychological damage we’re doing to them. Zach’s like, “Nah, these kids are cool.” So, we all decided we needed to have a test day where they can play around with the body, and not have a ton of blood on it so they could see it’s all make-believe. It was fun. It was cool. That actually turned out really well. I love sitting in the theater again, because I saw it last night. I love sitting in the theater last night and just watching people like, “Whoa! What the fuck am I watching?” because it just hits you in the face. I think it’s pretty great that the gore is really saved for that moment in the film. I mean, there’s tidbits and little pieces of it throughout the film, but really, that’s some hardcore stuff at the end. The fact that children are doing it, it’s even better. My favorite is pulling out the ear.
CD: Yes.
JC: Actually, I have one other favorite part, and that is Zach’s like, “I just want to see these kids getting showered in blood.” I was like, “All right.” So, I get underneath the camera with a big fire extinguisher. It’s funny because when I did it, Zach’s like, “Yeah, I think that’s too much.” But, I saw three shots in the film last night where it’s just, kids are being showered in blood. I was like, “All right, that’s great. That worked out,” but it was cool. It was fun. So, I think we all had a good time those days.
CD: Awesome. Well, before I let you go, we are just a few days removed from Halloween. I saw a lot of Gladyses out there. I went as Gladys myself. I had a drag queen friend do my makeup.
MW: Awesome.
CD: I chopped up an Amazon wig. So, it was a big day for a lot of us Weapons fans. What was it like seeing your work recreated on a grand scale like that by the public?
JC: Insane.
LS: Words do not describe.
MW: Surreal.
JC: I loved it. I found all of these people doing it. I kept adding them to my stories over a couple of days, because I just loved people doing their own makeup tutorials and over things that were all happenstance and fun that we were creating. As a makeup artist, and I think these two will agree, whenever you see people that adore it that much, when it has that effect, that’s the reason why you do what you do, because it had that effect on you when you were younger or on the outskirts or watching it. As an avid lover of Halloween as well, being my favorite holiday of all, the fact that everybody was… It was the one year that pained me that I didn’t have my big Halloween party. I usually have a Halloween party that has about five or 600 people come throughout the night. I would’ve loved to have it this year, because we would’ve had a Gladys competition.
CD: Yes! Night of a thousand Gladyses.
JC: Yeah, it should have been great. I mean, you two, what do you two think?
LS: No, I agree. It’s been so special, and it’s so surreal. Like Jason said, my feed and my stories are just littered with Gladyses. Every single thing that I see, I repost to my story. It’s just so special to see everyone’s twist, everyone’s spin on creating this character that obviously resonated with them, and seeing the LGBT community just glom onto Gladys, and the way that drag queens are impersonating Gladys. It’s really cool.
CD: Melizah, did you see any good wigs out there?
MW: Oh yeah. I actually did see a few good wigs, and I was like, “You got to tilt it a little bit or cut it shorter on one side.” But, it’s a trip. It really is a trip. You know what? Also, too, all the paintings and drawings and the Bratz dolls, I mean, what the hell? It’s so incredible! It’s really special.
CD: For the record, this is [my Gladys costume].
MW: Oh my God!
LS: Oh my God.
MW: I love that so much. Good job.
CD: Thank you. Again, my drag queen friend did the makeup. She nailed it.
LS: Who did your makeup?
CD: Her name is Naveena Lovelace.
MW: Thank you for sharing that.
JC: That’s fantastic.
CD: Well, thank you so much. This has been such a fantastic conversation. I love this movie so much, and I’m so excited to watch it probably every Halloween. It’s going to be in the rotation.
MW: There you go.
LS: Thank you. Thank you for having us.
JC: Thanks for having us.
Weapons is currently streaming on HBO Max and available to rent or own.
He currently resides in Chicago and is a proud member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. He also writes and podcasts for Next Best Picture and co-hosts his own podcast “Halloweeners: A Horror Movie Podcast.” You can follow him on Twitter, Letterboxd, and Bluesky @codymonster91
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