NBC’s ‘The Hunting Party’ Is a Dark New Drama — So Its Makeup Department Prioritized Happiness
Makeup design doesn’t always mean prosthetics or extremes — that’s why the Emmy Awards smartly single out contemporary makeup design as its own category. But too often, those more immediately arresting designs are the ones that get all the attention. Not anymore. Join IndieWire in celebrating the makeup artists creating subtle, character-specific work for contemporary shows.
NBC’s “The Hunting Party” has a haunting premise: A secret government program fakes the deaths of the country’s worst, most violent killers and then keeps them in a prison called The Pit for scientific study — until an explosion at the site releases them into the wild. Now, FBI profiler Bex Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh), CIA agent Ryan Hassani (Patrick Sabongui), and former Pit guard Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie) must track down the killers before they can murder again. In the best-case scenario.
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The episodes feature psychopaths and sociopaths, serial killers and thrill kills — in addition to a season-long mystery about just how the explosion occurred — and that can be a heavy day’s work for everyone on set. So makeup department head Paige Gatzka instituted a policy to keep the mood as light as she could.
“I am really very aware that how they leave my trailer is pretty much setting the tone for the rest of the day,” Gatzka told IndieWire. “The days are long. You’re there for hours and hours. So I always like to keep things very calm in the morning. And one of the best things about being on this production is that the cast really loves each other. We implemented a hug quota, and it basically said, ‘The happier you are, the more hugs that you get.’ So if you reach 12 hugs a day, you’re going to be the happiest.”
Those hugs likely came in handy as the three leads encounter some despicable characters — often suffering injuries themselves over the course of the episodes. “Most of the time, we let the makeup break down over the episode, depending on what they’re doing, what they’ve been through, where they’re going,” Gatzka said. “This whole series was really awesome. There’s a lot of different things that happen throughout the season, and [we’re] just keeping track of it all as we go along so we can make the subtle changes quickly on set to reflect the different things they’ve been through.”
Gatzka tackles that issue partly by conquering and dividing, assigning members of the department to keep track of individual characters. All of which is a far cry from her previous stint as the makeup department head on The CW’s “The Flash.”
”‘The Flash’ was obviously incredible for so many reasons,” she said. “But on ‘The Flash,’ you could go through a tornado, and you’re still going to look beautiful. You know, that’s the way of CW and that was really fun. Definitely coming into ‘The Hunting Party,’ it was a lot more realistic and, obviously, a lot more traumatic things happen.”
Gatzka is partly referring to the episode-of-the-week killer (“Those actors are all the nicest people,” she said with a laugh) and partly to the flashbacks throughout the season. And those got as complicated for the makeup team as they are dramatic to watch because of the bluer tones of their cinematography.
“Once you get into the lighting, not everything works,” Gatzka said. “For example, if a girl wears blush: You’re looking in the mirror and you think, ‘Oh wow, this looks nice and soft and dainty.’ When you get into that blue light, it looks like a bruise. We definitely had to dial down things like that. And even undertones in the men’s skin shine through differently when you’re in a blue light. It was getting them to the set and making sure that when we were getting into those close-ups, nothing was shining through that we didn’t want to be there.”
And that’s saying something, because both Sabongui and McKenzie have skin “like walking filters,” Gatzka said. “It was more tending to their facial hair, giving them things for their cleanup, and doing minimal makeup,” she said. Ah yes — facial hair on a series comes with its own set of challenges.
“Obviously not having facial hair myself, it’s something that you really have to learn, right?” Gatzka said. “Everybody’s facial hair is completely different. You think you’ve got it down pat. You go to somebody else, and you’re like, ‘Everything I knew was out the window.’ So it really just is trial and error. As much as the plans are there, you do have to make daily alterations to make sure that everything’s cohesive.”
“The Hunting Party” premieres new episodes on NBC Monday nights at 10 p.m. ET. The first episode is now streaming on Peacock; the series returns to NBC with new episodes February 10.
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