Jordan Samuel (‘Fellow Travelers’ makeup): ‘Hopefully we honored the people that the story was about’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
In creating the makeup for Showtime’s “Fellow Travelers,” Jordan Samuel wanted to do more than just age the characters over the course of three decades. For the Emmy-winning makeup artist, it was more important to honor the journey of these characters during this time period and do so in a respectful fashion. “It’s not just about making the actors older through the decades that we follow them,” Samuel argues in an exclusive video interview with Gold Derby (watch above). “It’s also about honoring periods correctly…and treating that with the utmost respect that we can.”
With the characters beginning the series during the McCarthy era, Samuel describes using several techniques to actually “de-age” the actors using practical approaches, and then eliminating those appliances to show the actors at their actual age. “The first stages of [the aging] became the omission of the lifts and the corrective work and essentially putting the actors on camera as they are at their actual ages,” he explains. “And then that, in turn, became a stage of the progression of the aging, and then we just bulti on top of that. So we backtrack to give ourselves the room to move forward.”
Because each character ages over the course of nearly four decades, Samuel says that he avoided a generalized approach to the makeup. Instead, he wanted each character’s life experience to influence how they age. “When I was looking at aging Hawk (Matt Bomer), the big turning point is his descent into drug and alcohol addiction in the 70’s after the death of his son, compounded with everything else that was going on in his personal life,” explains Samuel. “And obviously Tim’s (Jonathan Bailey) turning point was when he started to develop all the symptoms of AIDS.”
Like many others involved with the series, it is not lost on Samuel that this series serves as an important reminder of the struggle for queer rights throughout the last half of the 20th century. “There’s a lot of young people now that have no idea that this stuff went down or to the degree that it went down,” he says. “It was a heavy burden to bear, but it was a really important burden to bear. I think that we all thought about it the same way. We all carefully stepped through this in the best way that we could, and hopefully we honored the people that this story was about.”
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