As the department heads of hair and makeup, respectively, Shay Sanford-Fong and Gigi Williams both received Emmy nominations this year for their work on the first iteration of co-creator Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s “Monster” anthology series, “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” This marks the third career bid for Sanford-Fong, who is two for two for her contribution to another anthology series, FX’s “American Crime Story” (also executive produced by Murphy), and the very first for Williams.
“I’m so grateful for the other two that I had won, but I was the additional hairstylist, part of a team, which was great; I learned so much from everybody. And this time, I was the department head for the looks, so this one meant a lot to me, because in my life, I just really wanted… that recognition of my creativity and what I can give to everybody,” Sanford-Fong says of her acknowledgement during a recent webchat with Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I didn’t think it was gonna happen. I just got, actually, really, really shocked. And everyone was like, ‘No, it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen!’ I’m like, ‘You know, it’s not going to happen! It’s OK, you know, I gave it my all’… So I was overwhelmed, and I got a little teary-eyed. I was very, very happy — for me and happy for my team.”
Williams, too, expresses gratitude for the recognition from her peers in the TV academy. “It means a lot to me because I worked so hard on this project. I don’t really do TV very much, and in this business, if the makeup you do doesn’t scream, [if] it isn’t the first thing you see, if it isn’t over the top, people don’t really [take notice],” the makeup artist — an Oscar nominee for “Mank” (2020) — avows. “So for me, this really means a lot because I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs for years now that makeup should be subtle. It’s not the character, it’s a piece of the character. So for me, it was very gratifying.”
SEE Evan Peters (‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’) on how listening to music and freewriting helped him enter the mind of a serial killer [Exclusive Video Interview]
One of Williams and Sanford-Fong’s biggest tasks on “Dahmer” was, of course, transforming Evan Peters into the titular serial killer. When the hair department first met with the actor, he was still in the process of shooting “American Horror Story: Double Feature” and had dark, short hair. Jeffrey Dahmer, though, had blonde hair, so Sanford-Fong and her team assembled a collection of wigs that they would use on Peters as he portrayed his character across multiple decades. Murphy, however, had a specific wish: Peters would wear extensions for the 1970s, but his natural hair for the ’90s.
“So I had a colorist that worked for me — she was part of my team — and I [was] like, ‘We need to do summer blonde.’ So the first time we saw Evan, we only had one pass at him to do highlights. And it was kind of still too ash[y],” Sanford-Fong reveals. “So this where I’m like, ‘This is not the color,’ and I’m like ‘OK, I’ll have the colors here in 10 minutes.’ [The colorist] came to the trailer, I’m like, ‘More blonde!’ because the problem was, when we brought Evan to camera, it almost looked like a maroon color; it kept picking up so many different tones of red. It was not reading, ‘A nice summer blonde.’ So… we highlighted Evan’s hair again, and then we put him back on camera, and then we got the perfect color.”
Of course, Peters’ hair had to constantly be altered in order to reflect the change of Dahmer’s hair throughout the years. “[In the] ’70s, he had that fresh, … wavy hair that was just very soft-looking. And then, when we went through the decades, through the ’80s, we started getting a little more grimy and greasy,” the hair department head details. “[Peters] wanted his hair to look a little more disheveled. So [in the] late ’80s, he had to be handsome when he went to these clubs; he had to be a persuasive gentleman. So we made him very handsome. But then through the killings, he got dirtier, because I think he really did not bathe, because, if you think, he stored a lot of bodies in his bathtub.”
SEEParis Barclay makes history with Emmy directing nomination for ‘Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’
When it came to the makeup on Peters, it was particularly important to Williams that she nail his character’s 1991 look. It’s by the midpoint of that year that Dahmer had already killed the majority of his 17 murder victims, so he had, inter alia, a thick five o’clock shadow and dark circles under his eyes. Peters, however, had none of that when he stepped into the role, nor many of Dahmer’s facial features. “So I sat him down and started flicking a five o’clock shadow on, and then dark circles, and then… [changed] the shape of his eyebrows,” the makeup department head explains.
In the episode for which Williams is Emmy-nominated — the series opener, “Bad Meat,” which takes place in 1991 and follows the events that occasion Dahmer’s arrest — she also changed Peters’ face to accentuate the distress in which his character finds himself. “We had plumpers in because the real Dahmer looks like he’s been curb-stomped,” the Oscar nominee divulges. “And I would just be adding or subtracting sweat, etc., to make him feel the stress. And I must say that when we first did this look, [Peters] looked in the mirror when I was finishing with [it], and I could tell that he now felt like Dahmer.”
Dahmer, however, isn’t the central focus of the episode for which Sanford-Fong is shortlisted. She contends for “Lionel,” the eighth installment of the 10-part series, which features the impact statements from friends and family members of Dahmer’s victims, including from Rita Isbell, the sister of victim Errol Lindsey. For the hair department head, it was crucial that the actors playing these roles resembled their real-life counterparts as much as possible. “I wanted to make it feel like you were actually in that courtroom, to really [make you] feel the experience that they were going through at that time,” she highlights. “With, like, Rita Isbell yelling… I had to have her hair look exactly like that, like the real person, because they had her in the same clothes.”
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![‘Dahmer’ hair and makeup department heads on how they transformed Evan Peters into the titular serial killer [Exclusive Video Interview] (2024)](data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mP8/h8AAvMB+NzmkbcAAAAASUVORK5CYII=)