Original subtitles

Hi, this is Tamara Levine, and I'm the director of Very Important People, and

I'm joined with Alex. Hi, I'm Alex Perrone, and I was the makeup department

on Very Important People. And we're here to talk about, in my opinion, one of

the absolute craziest looks that we did, which was Ify's character, a .k .a.

The tomato alien creature from another planet.

I think it was, quote, sexy chest -haired alien was the starting point.

And, you know, I don't think we went too far away from that. Don't be afraid,

but if you are aroused.

I couldn't even tell with this makeup what was him and what was prosthetic. It

was that natural how you did it. So it was a two -piece prosthetic. There was

entire face piece as well as a cowl piece, which covers the shoulders going

behind the head. We went through a company that makes pre -made prosthetics

here, which was great because, unfortunately, when we're doing

this, we usually cast the actor and sculpt something, but we were trying to

this a mystery. We were fully prepared.

for it to not fit, and it didn't. His head measurement was way too large for

this first piece.

So luckily we had Bruce Fuller was helping us with this, and he made it

cut up the back. He did some patchwork. If it was two pieces, one was fully on

his face, how was he able to move his mouth so well?

So it's a soft enough foam that it's sticking to the actual structure and

muscles of the face. You're just adding about half an inch of foam that's a very

soft, pliable foam. So when he's speaking, it's moving with his natural

muscles, his natural expressions.

It can be a claustrophobic experience if you've never had a full face prosthetic

with a cowl piece, and he really handled it very well. I think one thing that

sticks out when we were brainstorming, talking about making the alien purple.

Some may ask, why is the alien purple and not green? And it's because we knew

that after each interview, we were going to throw the actors onto a green screen

to act out some of the stuff they talked about in the interview.

Vic was really, really good about...

teeing up green screen moments.

So anytime they said something like, take a look at the monitor.

You know, we have some footage of you looking in a security cam in my guest

house. Then we were kind of all behind the scenes saying like, okay, like what

do we have backstage to kind of like make this happen on green afterwards?

What kind of technology is this?

We were so worried about him looking down and seeing purple. So we just told

he could only look. straight ahead and so when he got up to go change we had to

be very careful that in his peripherals he wasn't seeing the tones of the

prosthetic or his hands he knew not to look at his hands so he was kind of

walking around

In a funny manner.

But we lucked out with the prosthetic as well because it jutted a bit off his

face, which kind of cured from seeing any kind of color. And we had little

lenses that we popped in at the end that also helped us. You know, we really

tried to throw him off. We kept talking about bringing in a dragon tail, just

all sorts of things. So we had no idea what was going on. We started to feel a

shift in him a bit when we started gluing on the chest hair piece because I

think he thought he was about done. And then we started adding that. From like

being excited.

A fun Easter egg is that chest hair piece that we used on him was actually

Adam Conover in Adam Ruins Everything.

I had a leftover Adam Conover chest hair piece from an episode that we, it was

perfect to add into this. So we ended up using that for our tomato.