Todd McIntosh (‘Griselda’ makeup artist) on the challenge of making Sofia Vergara plain-looking [Exclusive Video Interview]
In his 43 years working as a makeup artist in Hollywood, it’s doubtful Todd McIntosh ever faced a more formidable assignment than the one he was hired to pull off on the six-part Netflix biographical crime drama “Griselda”: turn the beautiful Sofia Vergara into an unattractive Colombian drug cartel boss. It wasn’t about transforming Vergara into Griselda Blanco, the real-life ruthless drug “queenpin” who brought cocaine to Miami in the 1970s and ’80s. “My job was to make Sofia look plain so she could disappear into the character she was creating,” McIntosh explains. “It was her character, her design. She was part of every single step from skin color to prosthetic shape.” But it was McIntosh who was tasked with “taking away the things that are beautiful about Sofia and making her into someone who is less.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
It would require three hours of daily makeup and prosthetic application before Vergara could go before the cameras. Ninety minutes of that was spent in McIntosh’s chair, where he focused on three key facial areas of tamping down the “Modern Family” star’s beauty: her nose, her pearly-white teeth and her eyebrows. Those “signature eyebrows – lovely, think and beautifully-shaped” – were a significant area of concern for the makeup man. “Eyebrow covers were the first part,” he says. “And then false eyebrows went on that were thin and arched and scrappier-looking in that 1970s shape because there’s also the beauty makeup on top of it and all the blending. And then I took away her beautiful nose tip, widening it at the end. And then with the teeth, we made them duller and slightly bent. Griselda was quite a smoker, so that impacted the look.”
The fake teeth initially presented an issue for Vergara and therefore for McIntosh as well. “She had two plates of teeth in, upper and lower,” he notes, “and Sofia speaks so rapidly when she’s speaking in Spanish that she was having trouble enunciating when she had both of those plates in. So, we took the bottom plate out and painted her teeth from that point on so that she had diction.”
In the context of the “Griselda” plot, the makeup really winds up playing something of a central role. It helps to tell the Griselda Blanco story through her evolving appearance. “We see Griselda at the beginning looking like a pampered housewife, made up but much softer (than she would be later),” McIntosh observes. “As we move through the stages where she’s building her new character with her new life circumstances, trying to fight off all these men, the makeup gets sharper. In truth, Blanco did wear a lot of makeup, though not specifically in the style we created. In terms of her lipstick, we move from these lighter brown shades into these darker, more maroon shades as she takes control. But then she hits the pinnacle in Episode 5 and everything is paranoid, everything’s falling apart, and we move from browns to blacks. Then her makeup starts to get smeared and her lipstick gets all odd.”
Once Griselda goes to prison, she still wears makeup, “but it’s haggard and rough. We found out that the real Griselda did wear makeup in prison. She had access to it and wore it. We left that part of her intact.” At the same time, McIntosh acknowledges that the limited series isn’t a documentary, and the character that Vergara was building “relied on makeup not to look softer but more powerful. It was part of her persona, her defense.”
Notably, McIntosh had no history with Vergara prior to working together on “”Griselda.” They met just four days before filming began. He’s learned in his four decades of working with performers that he’s most effective when he’s “as quiet as possible and not a distraction. in any way. It’s a special skill to be there with with them but at the same time be invisible. Sofia used the hour and a half with me to go over her lines on her phone while I applied everything. My job was to make her happy with how she looks. It was a lot for her to go through every day with the application, but this was a passion project (for her) and that changes your attitude about what you’re doing through.:
All six installments of “Griselda” are streaming on Netflix.
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