Saturday Night Live, Borat and more: The makeup behind the comedy

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An embarrassment for a newspaper was a triumph for a hairstylist.

In 2017, El Nacional, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic, carried a picture of the actor Alec Baldwin thinking he was Donald Trump. Baldwin often plays the US President on the comedy show Saturday Night Live.

Jodi Mancuso, the hair designer at SNL, and one who does Baldwin’s Trump hairdo, was amused.

"Alec showed me that (the paper) and we were laughing, we couldn't believe it," Mancuso said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

As political satire amps up its game before the US elections, the contribution of hair and makeup artists has come to the forefront. Recently, Jim Carrey joined the SNL lineup, went into makeup and emerged some hours later as an ageing and smarmy Joe Biden. Maya Rudolph appears as the vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and Beck Bennett plays vice-president Mike Pence.

Beyond SNL, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat 2 will release on Amazon Prime on October 3. Count on Borat, the fictional Kazakh journalist played by Cohen, to shock and mock Americans in his own way as he travels through the country and gatecrashes events, including a real Mike Pence rally.

Such acting roles require skilled hair and makeup professionals.

Baldwin’s Trump wig alone takes two days to prepare, for example.

“On show day, we paste down his hair, spray it and put the wig on top of his hair. It takes about 50 hours to build a wig; each hair is sewn in," Mancuso said.

Next, Louie Zakarian, SNL’s make-up department head, had to hunt for the right shade of orange for Baldwin’s face. “The trick was creating that orange [skin tone] and the light around his eyes, topped off with a crazy pair of eyebrows," Zakarian said in an interview.

The challenge is tougher for Cohen, who has to wear his makeup and then step out into the real world playing someone else. While working on ‘Who is America?’, where he played four vastly different characters, Cohen asked makeup and special effects designer Tony Gardner, “Do you think you could create prosthetics good enough that they would exist in the real world? Because I can't be touched for three hours." The question captured how good the makeup had to be.

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There is not much material on Borat’s makeup process on the internet. But the experiences of Cohen and his team while making Who Is America reveal the challenges of the job, such as 3 am to 11 pm workdays and secret hand signals if a disguise is slipping off, like Amol Palekar’s in the original Golmaal.

In an interview with vulture.com, Gardner, whose claims to fame include appearing in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, said, “The night before we check into the hotel and our room turns into a makeup trailer. Dozens and dozens of luggage have to be unloaded and ready by 3 a.m., and then the makeup process would, on average, take about three hours.”

After that the team would be with Cohen till he shot.

“On an average day, we’d be working 3 a.m. to 11 p.m,” Gardner said. “I’m lucky that my kids are in college. In the past, I wouldn’t be able to take a call and leave my house in a few hours’ notice to go to a random city. I had a ‘Sacha Go Kit’ ready at all times.”

From Ali G to Borat to Who is America, Cohen’s work hinges on his ability to convince people that his alter ego is genuine. The disguise has to be foolproof. There was an instance during Who is America where his beard started to come off. He was covertly summoned to the bathroom, where the beard was fixed again.

It is understandable Cohen does not wish to reprise the Who Is America characters.

"It is grueling. I'm too lazy to do this [anymore]," he said.

At least there is Borat and SNL to look forward to.