Featuring...
Dayne Johnson
The Beauty and Horror of the Hellmouth
 

continued from previous page...

Andy Hallett [The Host] Makeup in Progression 

Besides ‘chicken-head’ demon things, to which I’m sure David [Boreanaz] avoided like Angel avoids sunshine, this past season had quite a number of demons. Not until I started looking back did I realize not only in quantity but quality. We wanted to touch on a few that stood out for the fans as well as the producers as it turned out. We begin with obviously the most enjoyable and favorite of Danye’s, The Host, as he did an amazing job with him! “Thanks! He’s gaining ground quickly.” Plus more people know what he looks like now, not like at the Posting Board Party this past February where he snuck in unnoticed. “Yeah, we were talking about that. He and I are really close, God we have to be, I spend so many hours with him,” he jokes. “There was a time when we were at the set, Andy comes in in the morning, we’re there three hours before the crew ever gets there if he’s in the first shot. So he’d get his makeup on and he’d do whatever and he’d come back to my trailer and I’d take [his makeup] off and he’d go home. There was finally a day where it landed to where we got his makeup off right before lunch and he went to lunch.” Dayne recalls, “Well, he walked around the whole thing and not a soul knew who he was. And then finally, I started the ball rolling at lunch that day saying, ‘Do you know Andy?’ and they’d go, ‘No.’ ‘Well, this is Andy,’ and then, ‘Ohhh!’ They had like no clue. The directors come on for eight days and there again, we’re there before they are and he leaves when his makeup’s done and the directors don’t know what he looks like without it on,” he laughs. “So now most everybody knows and Andy’s so sweet.”

Tossing a few of the characters at Dayne, he gave us his comments on creating, working with and the inspiration behind the demon makeup of Season Two.

Merle, The Snitch: “Merle became very popular, with the producers too, they just liked the look, they liked the makeup. John Vulich liked it, it was one of their cool ones that they came up with right away in the first episode, Judgment. From there [the producers] were like, ‘We’ve got to bring this guy back, he’s cool.’ Then they started writing for him,” he explains. “I think they just liked his voice. That was [Matthew James’s] real voice,” he admits, “that’s the way he talked. They just liked the sound of him and he is a great character.”

Silas, The Priest of Pylea: Silas had some really cool tattoo art on his face that I found very interesting, and different from typical Angel demons. “Well thanks. I was concerned about the color. The color was hard to get on his skin and I was just fighting it tooth and nail as they say. But the tattoo work on his forehead and on his lip were something that I just created in the trailer and we said, ‘Okay, this is the look.’ The priests had the purple color if you ever saw them without their hoods on. When I finally saw it I liked it. I think he was on the short end of the budget because they wanted him to be a bald head first of all, which would have been a prosthetic and some kind of a forehead piece. I think those 4 episodes were very expensive and when they started cutting they cut Silas’s makeup out so we just ended up painting him.” Dayne offers, “When you start painting a flat canvas you’ve got to try and make dimensions out of a flat face.”

Julie Benz as Darla, in burn makeup
Darla, Drusilla and Harmony, Fem Vamp-fatal: Since these characters are so well known over on Buffy, we wondered if Dayne had to do any type of coordination with Todd to maintain their previous look. “David Deleon swore to Todd that he would never make them look like that because this is Angel and that’s Buffy,” he replied, breaking into a huge laugh. “He’d get him on the phone and say, ‘Oh you can send her back if you want to but I’m not using those colors.’ It was a funny thing.” Recalling Julie Benz, he remembers she was fine with whatever David did. “David’s a great makeup artist and they kind of kept her the same. The producers didn’t want her to look totally different because we don’t want to not recognize her. They did a few little things, wavy hair but it’s pretty similar. As far as Drusilla goes, we had our own little thing to do with her too, whether it be period or the vampire. Vampire we tried to keep the same but as far as her look, [Juliet Landau] kind of liked the colors she wears on Buffy so I would try and get those from Todd or say, ‘What is it, do you know, can I run out and buy it.’ We didn’t get any special notes from the producers or anything saying they have to look exactly the same. We had a little bit of free rein for them.”

But then there’s that little thing called ‘fire’ that vampires really don’t like! Not only do you have general makeup to consider but you also have special applications that are required to get the ‘just right’ well-done look, burned yet not charred-to-a-cinder. “Yes, as far as the fire part, obviously that’s our stunt girls. I guess you could tell more on Julie Benz than you could tell on Juliet that they had full-face burn makeups on. We had to run in there -- of course it’s nighttime and there’s nothing worse than this of, ‘okay here they are, now do a burn makeup in 15 minutes.’ Well, like that doesn’t happen really if you want a good one. So we had prosthetic pieces all over her just as quick as we could,” he explains, “and then started coloring as fast as we could. We were like, ‘Well, okay they just got torched and they both have perfect hair,’ I mean it’s wet, but what happen to that hair? ‘Can we put a wig on, a ratty wig? Can we do something else?’ They were like, ‘No’ – oh great, alright. TV land, okay, don’t do everything completely realistic,” he states laughing and then goes on to detail, “There was so much water coming down on Juliet that you could see she was red but not clear and that scene was shot so fast! It was a cold night and that water was pumped actually out of a water-truck warmed. So the water was warm for the girls and not freezing. And they had a warming tent to go to as soon as they cut and sat on the heaters.” He can’t help but laugh as he concludes, “Ah, the things you miss not being on the set!”

 



Return to Behind the Scenes Main Page