Jodi Mancuso and Louie Zakarian (‘Saturday Night Live’ hair and makeup heads) on ‘the most fulfilling’ job ever [Exclusive Video Interview]
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What keeps “Saturday Night Live’s” head hair designer Jodi Mancuso and makeup department head Louie Zakarian coming back to Studio 8H year after year? “It’s just creatively the most fulfilling, and the family there at ‘SNL’ is really amazing,” Mancuso tells me. “Everybody’s really supportive of each other, each of the departments, and week after week you feel like you’ve really accomplished something.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Zakarian chimes in, “After 28 years, it’s a fun place to work. I can’t imagine doing anything else. On a week to week basis, we get to recreate some pretty amazing makeup looks, get to create some of our own unique makeup and hair looks. It’s kind of amazing.” He later adds, “And Jodi and I work so well together, we just play off each other and have a good time. It’s kind of awesome.”
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When it comes to Season 48, which wrapped up in April, Zakarian claims one of his biggest challenges was creating the mouth-agape rollercoaster looks for Sarah Sherman and Michael B. Jordan. He reveals, “That was a tricky one trying to figure out, and having to do that on the host as well in the limited time we have.” The makeup department head also highlights “The Whale” spoof with Woody Harrelson as particularly memorable, recalling how they had to “make him in five minutes gain a couple hundred pounds and be able to go out there and still perform and do the sketch, and be able to get it off in two minutes for the next sketch.”
Mancuso explains how her biggest challenges often involve trying out different hairstyles on the host, since she doesn’t get as much time with them. “If there’s any prosthetic that has to be applied or a bald cap or anything, that’s difficult in the amount of time that we have, especially the host,” she says. “Obviously they’re in every single sketch, so you don’t really have a choice to have sketch time in between to do the application.”
Zakarian declares how there’s a “very set schedule” each week behind the scenes. “Like on Tuesdays,” he begins, “the host comes in for me, and they come in for a head scan for Jodi. They go in and do a wig bubble so they can start building patterns to build the wigs on. And then on Wednesday we have the table read where we read through 40 some-odd sketches. And then at night about 10 or 11, they’ll pick the 14 or 15 sketches that we’re going to produce for the show. And then the rollercoaster starts.”
When it comes to transforming James Austin Johnson into Donald Trump, “that wig is always a challenge,” Mancuso readily admits. “It is not easy, and Mr. Michaels wants it to be right. And lighting has a lot to do with it.” Zakarian confirms that he’s “redone that makeup three or four times on him already to try and get it to look better each time.” He notes that “trying to get James to look like Trump is a daunting feat onto itself [because] they look nothing alike.”
Also in our exclusive video interview, Mancuso and Zakarian talk about some of the season’s most memorable sketches from the perspective of the hair and makeup teams, including Bowen Yang as Krampus, Ego Nwodim as Lisa From Temecula and Steve Martin & Martin Short in the bloody “A Christmas Carol” remake. Mancuso has won seven Emmy Awards and Zakarian has taken home nine through the years.
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