Chris Miller
In the world of filmmaking every detail matters. When it comes to character development in the filmmaking process, those details are often left in the hands of the makeup artist, costume designer and hair stylist. In the case of the makeup team, these creatives bring characters to life in ways that are both subtle and transformative and play a critical role in shaping the visual narrative of a story—whether it be through creating realistic wounds, aging a character, or simply giving a character a personality through their look.
Serving as the makeup head on Netflix’s body swap horror comedy, It’s What’s Inside, was Claire Amadea, who is no stranger to the subgenre, having worked on Paramount +’s Significant Other. It’s What’s Inside was somewhat of a dream project, creatively, for Claire because they not only got to give each character a personality through the makeup that was applied to their faces, but they also got to work extensively with tattoo design/application, as well as prosthetic work. When discussing the tattoo process Claire says, “We applied nearly 100 tattoos between two characters for this. Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) has 28 individual pieces applied and Maya (Nina Bloomgarden) has 63. I worked quite closely with Gavin on Dennis’ overall look. We wanted him to have that vibe of a rich kid trying way too hard to convey the air that he’s a tough guy, who spends a fortune on tattoos that don’t really mean anything except to look cool but thinks he’s super deep.” We spoke with Claire extensively below about everything from how CG is changing the makeup business to which character in It’s What’s Inside they had the most fun with.
You can stream It’s What’s Inside here. Please note that the interview includes spoilers for the events of the film!
Film Obsessive: What inspiration films did the director list during pre-production to convey the vibe of It’s What’s Inside?
Claire Amadea: Tonally, Greg had some great references for IWI. Jordan Peele and Ti West were in the pitch deck, along with Black Mirror, naturally, and some slightly deeper cuts like Ingrid Goes West and Thoroughbreds. It gets compared to Bodies! Bodies! Bodies!, which I think is really great. I love that movie.
You have a love of horror and sci-fi, so It’s What’s Inside must have been an ideal project for you to work on because it combines both genres. Do you seek out projects in this genre or was it just a coincidence?
I really do love horror and sci-fi, but I’ll work on just about anything if the story is good. In fact, I just did my first straight up comedy last year (shout out to Paradise Records and Logic) I don’t specifically seek out projects like It’s What’s Inside, but they do tend to find me fairly often. Actually, now that I think about it, IWI is the second body swap/body snatching movie I’ve worked on. I also worked on Significant Other, which features a body-snatching alien (sorry if I’m spoiling it but it’s been out for several years now). My bucket list is to end up on a Star Trek and Star Wars project some day, which may be blasphemous, but I deeply love both properties.
Was there anything you had planned out but on the actual shooting day didn’t work and you had to modify?
Oh for sure. Dennis’ death gag did not work out as planned and we winged it a little. Normally, we would have a chance to test something like this, but we were moving fast and didn’t have the opportunity. Dennis falls to his death from the roof of the house and is impaled on a very surreal statue.
I had a plan to seat magnets into the prosthetics we put on him and have a mate on the spears from the statue he falls on so it would click together, but I didn’t anticipate that the removable spears we had were actual metal and therefore quite top-heavy. It was just a miscommunication/oversight where props and set dressing and I didn’t connect and talk it through. Normally one of our departments would make a mold of them and run a lightweight version out of foam or plastic, but we just never had a conversation about it. What we ended up doing was placing the spears into the prosthetics and just holding them steady out of frame. It worked fine, even if it was a little less cool and impressive.
There are some scenes in the film that are very uniquely lit and contain red hues. Did you have to alter the makeup for these scenes to stand out more?
We had to plan for multiple different lighting scenarios – there was “regular” color lighting in the scenes, but also several shots where actors walk behind colored panes of glass which thematically works like RGB art. RGB art is a style of art where different color gels reveal different art work by canceling out the corresponding color: red cancels out red, so you only see the blue and green color in the piece, green cancels green, and so on. The idea was that colored glass would work the same way and break the fourth wall to an extent so that if a character passed in front of a colored pane of glass, you would see who was really in their body. It worked as a shorthand way to track the body swapping which had the potential to be really chaotic and incomprehensible if not done very carefully. The lighting department used gels to get the effect. This concept was actually something that drew me to the project. Designing makeup for one type of lighting is challenging enough, but three? Sign me up. We had to choose colors that wouldn’t get canceled out too much under both red AND green and not look insane in normal lighting. We would adjust on the spot if anything looked weird in the colored lighting as well.
Can you talk about your tattoo work you did for the film?
Oh boy, can I. There’s a lot of it to talk about.
We applied nearly 100 tattoos between two characters for this. Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) has 28 individual pieces applied and Maya (Nina Bloomgarden) has 63. Huge thanks to Tinsley Studios and Hookup Tattoos for some really quick turnarounds on last minute orders. I also designed and made quite a few custom pieces for the show as well.
I worked quite closely with Gavin on Dennis’ overall look. We wanted him to have that vibe of a rich kid trying way too hard to convey the air that he’s a tough guy, who spends a fortune on tattoos that don’t really mean anything except to look cool, but thinks he’s super deep. He’s got knuckle tattoos that say “HOME SICK” that Gavin chose because no matter how hard Dennis tries to be cool and fit into a group, he’s got nowhere he really belongs because he’s self-absorbed enough to wreak havoc in his own friend group, which is the driving force behind the entire plot. He’s also got a giant chest piece that says “FORGIVEN” in script that I made at Gavin’s request. We figured that Dennis also is oblivious enough to think that he can just forgive himself for everything and it’s all fine, without a single second thought about the damage he’s caused. The rest of his pieces are a hodgepodge of design styles and subject matter because Dennis is the type of guy to get something because he thinks it looks cool and makes him look hard, rather than putting much thought into design and cohesion. There is a tiny little easter egg though – I’m very heavily tattooed myself, and I really like to sneak one of my own tattoos into characters’ tattoo work when the opportunity presents itself. No one else will ever see it, but I know it’s there and it makes me chuckle. I gave Dennis a small skeleton key tattoo tucked into one of his sleeves that matches one I have. All told, from the ground up, tattoo application and the rest of his makeup and grooming would take about an hour and a half. I also maintained his facial hair and exploited a scar in his eyebrow to make it look intentional.
Maya also took a lot of care and thought to come together. When we did makeup tests, it was just me, and while a few of Maya’s tattoos were directly called out in the script, a lot was left unspoken. We decided that Maya’s tattoos also shouldn’t be particularly thematically or stylistically cohesive as she’s a wandering free spirit and would get tattoos wherever she travels, from a different artist each time I essentially brought my entire existing backstock catalog of tattoos to piece everything together, since there wasn’t quite enough prep time to do it all custom. I put on what I thought was a ton of tattoos and got the note of “more,” and like I said, we ended up with 63 pieces on her with zero repeats. She had a really brilliant and beautiful idea when we needed more pieces to fill everything out and asked if we could turn some of her late father’s doodles and artwork into tattoos. I loved this idea, and I thought it was one of the loveliest tributes I’d ever heard, and I was really honored to be able to do that for her. I put everything into a digital art program and tattoo-ified them (yes I know that’s not a word) and made sheets of temporary tattoos out of them. Ultimately, Maya was handled by my key Sara Dickman on set, but this was such a time consuming undertaking that if we could, the rest of us would get through our people and help slap tattoos on. She could easily take 2.5-3 hours starting from bare skin. Nina had zero visible real tattoos to help us out.
For both of them, since there were so many tattoos and it could really eat up a ton of time, we tried to preserve tattoos overnight as much as we could. Sometimes it just couldn’t be helped though.
Which character in It’s What’s Inside was your favorite to create looks for? Why?
I really loved designing the whole ensemble – I had a hand in every single look in the movie, as for the test day, I was the only one from our department authorized to work – although I ultimately delegated actors out to my team. During tests, I lay down the broader strokes and groundwork for director and actor approval, so we know the direction we’re going, but ultimately, I’m only one person so I delegate people out. I handled four characters daily myself – Dennis, Nikki, Forbes, and Beatrice – while Sara took three (Maya, Cyrus, and Reuben) and our third makeup artist Henry took the remaining two (Shelby and Brooke). The day player actors wound up delegated between Sara and our amazing additional makeup artist Stephanie June Johnson, who also handled most of our background talent for us.
I think I laughed the most with Gavin/Dennis, as he’s a pretty silly character ultimately, and Gavin was fearless when it came to making suggestions or letting me run with ideas. Nina/Maya was really touching, with the suggestion of using her father’s art which is a detail no one knows about unless they ask, and I love me some hidden layers and meanings within makeup. David/Forbes is super subtle but effective, and doing subtle character makeups is really satisfying to me. Alycia/Nikki had a really gorgeous clean look which on the surface might not feel like anything that important, but when you realize that everything about Nikki is painstakingly curated and presented, that sharp, clean, flawless veneer becomes a lot more interesting, from her eyeliner choice down to her nails (an absolutely stunning job done by my dear friend Amber Murphy). Madison/Beatrice was a completely unhinged character which is always fun to do, and we wanted her to have dramatic bruising around her eyes to match her equally dramatic entrance to the plot at the end.
My team also made really interesting design choices. Like I said, I set the basic broad strokes of the makeup looks, but once I delegate someone to one of my team, I want them to feel ownership of it and to have creative buy in, so I want them to make creative decisions. Sara chose to leave Devon’s facial hair a little bit stubbly and to leave his under eye unconcealed to portray Reuben’s exhaustion from wedding planning, and she also made a lot of choices on tattoo placement for Maya. Henry had the final call on Brooke’s makeup look, as we trialed a couple of options during the makeup test, and landed on a stunning look with a frost eye shadow and strong liner.
Additionally, all the characters had flashback looks. There’s a narration about a party that happened years ago while the characters were all in college together, so we came up with a style evolution for them from college to present day. Not all the looks made it into the final cut, but we see Dennis, Nikki, Forbes, Reuben, and Beatrice. For Dennis, it was as simple as choosing some tattoos to not apply and filling in his brow. Nikki got a stronger makeup look, which while still sharp and on trend for the time period of the flashback, is distinct from her clean, more natural look in the present day. Reuben was cleaned up and his under eye was corrected and concealed while any existing blemishes were allowed to ride. Beatrice was fresh-faced with broader blush placement and some subtle highlight and shadow to round her face out more to make her look more youthful, since she’s meant to be underage in this time frame.
The whole process is really satisfying to me, from the initial experiments to feel out the look to seeing what my team comes up with. Also, if I do say so myself, everyone looks amazing in the end product, though I might be a little biased.
I imagine on every film set you take something away from it, meaning, you might learn something new. Did you learn anything from It’s What’s Inside?
I am always finding new ways to do my job or refine existing processes to make things more efficient or run more smoothly. After this show, I refined my script breakdown method and created a spreadsheet format to work from instead of a Word document with my notes, which it turns out is easier for everyone to access. The breakdown goes out to the script supervisor and the AD team to get us all on the same page, and I’ve gotten feedback that the spreadsheet I use is very helpful. I also learned from the situation with the Dennis death scene that over-communication is preferable to under-communication, and haven’t had a repeat of any sort of similar situation.
David Thompson also introduced me to the band Idles, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.
Is there a director you would love to work with some day? Why?
I want Greg Jardin to write It’s What’s Inside 2. Seriously though, he’s an amazing collaborative colleague and I’d work with him again in a heartbeat.
I can confidently say I would gladly trade vital organs and/or limbs for a chance to work with Guillermo del Toro.
I’m a huge fan of the Wachowski sisters. They’re an inspiration, and visually, their projects are some of my favorites.
Really, I’ll work with anyone who makes really interesting story choices.
What changes in the makeup industry have you seen from your first production to now?
Some of the biggest changes I’ve seen are in the sizes of department. There’s been a contraction happening for years in a lot of aspects of production, from the total budget size of projects to what’s allotted for the makeup department. You see a lot more smaller projects where there’s only an allowance for a department head and a key and you have to fight for any more labor than that.
There aren’t as many grand-scale, prosthetic/creature makeup-centric projects anymore. They still happen, but there’s been a shift to CG for a lot of it and the budgets just aren’t there as much to create something like that from the ground up. We’re really fortunate to have several companies who focus on having a library of versatile prosthetics available because our prep time is frequently the first thing to get cut.
There’s also the broader industry contraction at large that’s happening right now. Things are the most uncertain I’ve seen them in 17 years, and it’s a scary time to rely on film and television to make a living. I have to say it’s very surreal to be campaigning for an Emmy nomination at the same time as everything else that’s happening in the world.
What is your favorite part of your job?
There’s nothing else I’d rather do, honestly. The entire process is so satisfying and scratches a brain itch in a way nothing else does. It’s high pressure and stressful, and really I help people play dress up and pretend for a living, but it’s creation and logistics and piecing together a puzzle and making people real from an idea in someone’s head. There are science components. There’s the human element. It’s painting and it’s skin care and anatomy and it’s human psychology and physics. There’s nothing else quite like it in the world.
