How Ma Rainey’s Hair and Makeup Team Transformed Viola Davis

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

Predominantly set over the course of 1 sweltering July day in Chicago, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a fictionalized depiction of a heated recording-studio session that highlights the struggles and exploitative practices Black musicians have encountered. Adapted from August Wilson’s Tony-nominated play of the identical identify, it has racked up 5 Academy Award nominations, together with nods for Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, and costume designer Ann Roth (who gained for The English Patient in 1997). Davis’s make-up artist, Sergio Lopez-Rivera, was nominated alongside hair division head Mia Neal and Davis’s private hairstylist, Jamika Wilson, the latter pairing making Oscar historical past as the primary African Americans nominated within the Best Makeup and Hairstyling class. “It took a number of days to return again down and take in all the joy of the nomination,” Wilson informed Vulture in a latest Zoom dialog. “Especially as a result of we’re the primary African Americans [in this category]. It’s overwhelming with pleasure and then it’s such a accountability.”

Wilson and Lopez-Rivera have each had lengthy working relationships with Davis, and each are presently juggling Oscars press with prepping for Davis’s new function as Michelle Obama in Showtime’s forthcoming anthology drama The First Lady. Wilson first collaborated with the actress in 2008 throughout press for Doubt, and Lopez-Rivera started working together with her on How to Get Away With Murder in 2014. Multiple make-up tutorials could be discovered on-line primarily based on Davis’s grasp manipulator Annalise Keating within the Shonda Rhimes collection, however the identical is much less doubtless for Ma Rainey’s greasepaint look. The function of the hair and make-up group isn’t merely to make an actor look glamorous, nevertheless, and Lopez-Rivera and Wilson are adept at utilizing their experience to move Davis to a different period. In Ma Rainey, her character’s efficiency plumage and warpaint are dialed down, however solely a notch, because the Mother of the Blues enters the recording studio in a full painted face and {custom} wig, prepared for no matter confrontations she might have.

In early April, Lopez-Rivera joined Wilson to debate their work on Ma Rainey, the collaborative course of with costume designer Roth, and how they delivered to life a singer whose picture had barely been caught on movie. Here, they talk about their analysis and methods, the methods Rainey used magnificence instruments as armor, and one similarity to a earlier award-winning Davis function.

Each division undertook exhaustive visible analysis but managed to uncover solely a scant few pictures of Rainey, and out of the seven complete, just one is a close-up of the singer. This shot proved invaluable to the artistic groups. Inspiration requires a germ of an thought, and the singer’s headshot delivered the premise on which Lopez-Rivera may construct a basis. It wasn’t merely a case of mimicking the make-up, he notes, however understanding the psychology and the social components behind Rainey’s decisions. “Looking at this image of her, I may get that she appreciated to be fairly and put on fairly issues, indicated by this lovely headband that she wore,” he says. “There’s a bit of, tiny sloping of her decrease eyeliner that gave me the thought, Oh yeah, this girl is making an attempt to make her eyes look extra spherical.” His interpretation of this make-up approach was that Rainey “was intimately wanting to seem just like the canons of fantastic thing about that point.” Written descriptions from the interval name out the blues singer’s lack of magnificence — even going as far as to name her the ugliest girl in present enterprise — however Lopez-Rivera explains that this didn’t negate her makes an attempt to shine.

The metallic headband Davis wears is a part of Rainey’s glitzy onstage glamour and is paired with a horsehair wig (extra on that under). In collaborating with Roth, Wilson explains that they selected this specific headband due to its gold sparkle issue. While they’d a particular imaginative and prescient of how Rainey would look in public-performance mode, her on-the-road and recording getup was a way more speculative course of. “We needed to think about being her, just about,” says Wilson.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

Conceiving the signature sweaty greasepaint look was just one a part of the problem for Lopez-Rivera as Davis’s private make-up artist. “I used to be making an attempt to provide you with methods to make Viola much less Viola and extra Ma — as a result of we didn’t undergo the route of prosthetics, the challenges turned very natural,” he says. Another concern the group had on the 40-day shoot — which primarily depicted sooner or later — was sustaining tight consistency over the completely different levels of the shifting make-up. One of Wilson’s roles as Davis’s private hairstylist was, she says, matching the evolving make-up work and “ensuring I saved up with the continuity, coping with Sergio’s sweat and all.” The mixture of stifling warmth and Rainey’s heavy clothes produces a visceral picture that, at instances, seems as if her face is melting. Lopez-Rivera refers back to the perspiration as “an unimaginable character in and of itself,” and the warmth radiates off the display screen and into our houses. “It was a variety of close-ups on Ma and targeted in a single room — we didn’t have a variety of completely different setups. You had no alternative however to look proper at Ma the entire time,” says Wilson.

“This story has to make sense with the actual fact this can be a girl that realized the right way to do make-up when she was a young person performing in vaudeville,” says Lopez-Rivera. “So robotically, there’s a stage-makeup high quality.” Likening this issue to an outdated film star getting caught in a method rut, he drew additional inspiration from Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Yet there was a further historic actuality to contemplate, he says: “This girl within the Nineteen Twenties didn’t have entry to make-up the best way white girls did. How do you develop into artistic? How do you do selfmade merchandise? Because when you’ve got completely no entry to basis for darkish pores and skin, what do you do when you’ve got hyperpigmentation?” 

Fingertip utility methods helped him create the imperfections that might have been attributable to each product unavailability and the warmth rippling in each close-quartered scene. It was very important that the eyebrows had been shaved earlier than drawing them in utilizing the pencil-thin type of the ’20s as a result of it added to the genuine depiction. “Those decisions didn’t come throughout as decisions of mine however decisions of Ma’s,” Lopez-Rivera says. “That’s why it couldn’t be good. It couldn’t be symmetrical.”

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

There’s a distinction between making Davis’s beauty masks appear as if it’s slipping within the warmth of a sweltering efficiency and the truth of getting it mounted in completely melted place at some stage in a 14-hour shoot. “It’s like a life portray. It has to dwell, breathe, make sense with the temperature of the room or make sense with the wrestle she’s experiencing at that second in her day,” says Lopez-Rivera. Products by up to date manufacturers like RCMA, Blinc, M.A.C, and DM all helped paint the beauty canvas, however he did make the most of methods from the interval, together with layering on flaky, dry mascara. “For her present performances, her make-up was barely extra exaggerated, and she was extra sweaty,” he says. When she removes her lashes on the finish of a present, he wished the impact of trying like “they’ve 50 coats of mascara.” Roth additionally thought of the damage and tear attributable to perspiration and the pains of performing. “When Ma is completed at night time, when she takes her garments off, they’re moist. And they get on a bus or a prepare, and her garments take a beating,” the designer mentioned in a manufacturing notice. “These garments are powerful; they’re not delicate. She would love them to be, however she’s not a fragile girl.”

A horsehair wig custom-made by hair division head Neal is a centerpiece of Rainey’s performing apparel; the genuine materials matches what the true singer wore. Neal imported the horsehair from England and not solely needed to construct the wig herself to make it display screen prepared but additionally needed to rid the fabric of inactive lice eggs and manure. And so as to not lose management of the bundle of hair, Neal needed to construct the wig earlier than she cleaned it. The intricate course of was additional hampered by the hair’s thickness, which prompted Neal to construct the wig utilizing a single-strand air flow methodology. Each time she pulled a strand by means of, manure and lice eggs had been scraped off. When the wig was accomplished, she boiled it and cleaned it (although its odor by no means went away). This proved invaluable past the apparent hygiene causes. Wilson describes Neal discovering that horsehair softens throughout this course of and likens the consequence to a modern-day artificial wig. Neal would put it into boiling water to set the curl. “When she handed the wig alongside to me, we found that it actually holds its curl,” says Wilson. “It additionally provides the sensation of kinky, textured hair. It was very bendable, so typically when there have been touch-ups to do, you’re taking your finger and roll the hair round your finger and set a curl there.”

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

A second wig, which Davis wears for almost all of the movie, was European, its Nineteen Twenties type created utilizing rollers and a modern-day setting lotion for a moist, tight curl. “We pushed the waves again into the hair to set it with hair spray,” says Wilson. The group estimates that Davis would spend 90 minutes every day in hair and make-up. Lopez-Rivera calls the wig assortment a “murals.”

Great tooth are sometimes anachronistic, and dropping Davis’s Twenty first-century smile modified every little thing for Lopez-Rivera. “I feel they deserve an Oscar nomination all on their very own as a result of with out them my job would have been a lot more durable,” he says of the gold-colored pop-in dentures Davis wore within the movie. He credit the members of the hair and make-up group who should not listed as Oscar nominees with “such exhaustive work erasing traces of the Twenty first century from everybody within the background,” protecting every little thing from tattoos and piercings to sideburns and hairlines. “It feels so genuine. It looks like you’re virtually watching a documentary,” he says.

Wilson remembers being in awe of Roth and how she prepped the background actors with particular backstories. “She would stroll as much as them and inform them their half — who they had been and why they had been of their wardrobe. It was superb,” she says. Lopez-Rivera provides that the veteran designer defined the main points, like “why that prime button wouldn’t be buttoned on you, why you wouldn’t be sporting that lipstick since you’re coming from the market.”

Lopez-Rivera later found how members of different departments adjusted their work in response to the hair and make-up assessments, together with cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, who “modified his lenses in order that he may management the shine of the sweat with out the colour of her pores and skin turning cool. Because he wished the honey shade but additionally actually gritty.”

“I positively consider she knew her value,” Wilson says of Rainey and the aesthetic decisions she made. The costumes, make-up, and hair within the movie mirror the singer’s sartorial armor. Lopez-Rivera cites the intensive analysis every division undertook to create a completely fashioned determine as the explanation all of it works so superbly. “You notice that this girl struggled with making the world see her, with making the world give her worth,” he says. When Rainey is on her method to the studio, we see her brazenly flaunting her wealth by means of each materials good potential, together with a brand new automobile and luxurious clothes. Wearing a fur collar or velvet robe in the course of a Chicago summer time makes an announcement, and the make-up artist observes that she was “like a strolling billboard of every little thing she owns.”

“Ann will inform us there’s no jewellery left within the lodge; every little thing is on her palms. Anything she owns is on this girl’s physique,” he says. “It’s attention-grabbing, psychologically talking, that visually it was vital for her to have folks take a look at her and know that she was value it.” Wilson agrees that the world was towards Rainey, and Lopez-Rivera provides, “I feel she thought — rightly so — that by saying her value forward of time, she would reduce the confrontations that she would encounter in any other case as a Black girl in America. That it in some way would defend her a bit of bit.”

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

In 2014, Davis delivered a memorable efficiency in an early How to Get Away With Murder episode that’s indicative of her potential to eschew self-importance. A transformative scene by which she slowly removes her make-up and wig lays naked a hardened and polished character. (It additionally options the unforgettable cliffhanger line “Why is your penis on a lifeless lady’s telephone?”) On HTGAWM, it was Davis who advised this “unmasking,” and Lopez-Rivera likens this second they labored on collectively to Davis’s angle on Ma Rainey. “The cause why she was ready to do this scene is identical cause why we had been ready to do that film. She doesn’t care about her personal self-importance when she’s performing,” he says. “Even when supplied the chance, like, ‘Hey, we will movie this scene in a manner the place we will lower away from it, and we don’t need to hold rolling so that you don’t really need to take your make-up off,’ she was like, ‘Absolutely not! I need to do that.’ She’s thinking about authenticity. She leaves her self-importance at house.”

Awards season 2021 has seen glam squads step up the wonder sport for distant broadcasts. Wilson has been multitasking between working with Davis on creating thrilling seems for a number of journal covers and digital pink carpets in addition to doing her personal press and operating a salon enterprise. “I’m actually a behind-the-scenes individual, so doing interviews is completely out of the field for me,” she explains. Wilson and Lopez-Rivera have been juggling Ma Rainey press and prepping Davis’s subsequent mission; they’ll quickly fly to Atlanta for Showtime’s The First Lady simply days after the in-person Oscar ceremony. Wilson says she’s busy creating wigs for the present, an anthology drama specializing in Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama in its first season.

Lopez-Rivera says his preparation for The First Lady consists of some very granular however extraordinarily vital glam work. “I’m about to start out designing the completely different shapes of eyebrows of Michelle all through the years,” he says, exhibiting Vulture a mould of Davis’s brow and nostril bridge. Using transfers and stencils, he’ll match the continuity to Obama’s altering brows. After doing this complete awards season from behind a display screen, Wilson and Lopez-Rivera are trying ahead to the Oscar ceremony (and each have their outfits picked out). “I can’t wait to be with all people collectively, all of the nominees — by now we might know one another so nicely in a traditional, non-pandemic yr,” Lopez-Rivera says enthusiastically. “Like, come on, let’s hang around!”