Elle Favorule and Natalie Shea Rose (‘The Iron Claw’ makeup and hair) on creating blood, sweat and wigs for their wrestling drama [Exclusive Video Interview]
They don’t necessarily teach you a lot that’s practical about creating fake sweat and blood in makeup school, or hairpieces that will hold up under intense wrestling action. So for their new biographical wrestling drama from A24, “The Iron Claw,” makeup department head Elle Favorule and hair department head Natalie Shea Rose did a lot of learning on the fly. “Sweat and blood were definitely the biggest component, but a lot of guys also had tattoos we had to cover,” Favorule explains. “Usually with tattoo cover, you definitely don’t want to be doing loads of high-friction movement, and that’s basically all we were doing. So right off the bat with our camera tests, we needed to find the secret recipe for covering tattoos to withstand the friction, withstand real sweat, withstand fake sweat and blood and all of the other elements…They were really wrestling these matches over and over again, so longevity was a huge component for us. And so that was the battle.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“The Iron Claw” tells the story of the Von Erich brothers professional wrestling dynasty in the early 1980s, through glorious triumph and ultimately wrenching tragedy. It stars Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White. The Von Erichs represented the dawn of a kind of rock ‘n’ roll vibe in the sport, and their long, generally unruly hair presented a particular challenge for Rose to meet. “We wanted to match the (real) Von Erichs as much as possible,” she says. “My biggest goal and (writer-director) Sean Durkin’s was to get everybody as close to the actual characters as possible while still looking good themselves and not going so far that it was like, ‘Okay, they’re wearing a wig.’ Part of my struggle was, ‘Is it bad or right, but it looks right because they had bad hair. Stop it. You’re fine’.”
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A chief issue for Rose was, like her colleague Favorule, that all of her handiwork was constantly in motion and had to hold up under sometimes impossible conditions. “There were several days,” Rose maintains, that we had nine wigs working all at once, and they were all shooting for 10 minutes at a time. So it was just chasing all of that around.” Not that it was all about using hair enhancement. “We tried to use their real hair as much as possible because it’s always going to look more natural,” she adds, “but if their hair is too short we had to get a wig to achieve what we needed.” That sometimes meant keratin-bonded extensions “that would adhere very tightly around each two or three hair so what when they moved, you had no idea. You never saw any line.”
When she was learning her craft, Favorule was taught that glycerin was what you use for sweat in a film or TV production. But she found on the Iron Claw” and other sets that it wasn’t a perfect liquid to achieve what she needed to achieve. “Glycerin is sticky and it’s slippery and a lot of people don’t like it because of the way it feels, and it breaks down tattoo cover,” Favorule emphasizes. “So it was trial and error. And then you add tanning and full-body shaving on top of that.” Full-body shaving? “With the guys, we probably did that every other day rather than every day because there was so much friction with the skin and the mat.”
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Then there was the blood – or rather, bloods. It turns out there are a number of different types that a make-up artist needs to become familiar with and use properly. “There’s flow blood, drying blood, aged blood, and then all of the color variations,” Favorule notes. “And the process for blood when it’s in action is a little bit different. Once we found the color range, it’s a lot of layering, using color-activated makeups that don’t budge. Those go down first in the pattern that you want them. Drying blood looks wet but stays dry and doesn’t move. Flow blood goes on top of that when there’s actual movement in the scene, and it helps with continuity. The boys were such troupers about, ‘Yeah, I don’t care if it gets in my eyes. Whatever needs to happen.’ Whatever happened in that ring was completely out of our hands. We set the blood and then sent them on their way.”
“The Iron Claw” from A24 is being released in theaters on December 22.
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