{"id":491411,"date":"2026-06-09T22:21:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T22:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/491411\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T22:21:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T22:21:14","slug":"saturday-night-live-hair-and-makeup-quick-turnaround-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/491411\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Saturday Night Live’ Hair and Makeup Quick Turnaround \u2014 Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

The turnaround on \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d<\/a> is famously brutal. Technically, the production staff have Sunday and Monday off, but\u2026 do they really? The costume, hair, and makeup teams all need to hit the ground running on Tuesday when the show\u2019s host comes in for their fitting. Through script read-throughs and rehearsals, the Friday pre-taped segments, and last-minute changes on the day of, the work runs right up until the moment each episode wraps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, that doesn\u2019t mean that \u201cSNL\u201d<\/a> departments haven\u2019t found ways to do more, and more ambitious work on the NBC show\u2019s maxed-out treadmill of a schedule. Both deep experience and new technology have allowed \u201cSNL\u201d to come up with anything from an army of bobs<\/a> to ChatGPTio to as many orcs as can fit on the stage at Studio 8H.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"'Dexter<\/a> \"LONDON,<\/a> <\/p>\n

The makeup team has been led by Louie Zakarian and the hair team by Jodi Mancuso for multiple decades now. \u201cIf they have me back next year, it will be 26 years,\u201d Mancuso told IndieWire, adding jokingly that, \u201cLouie\u2019s been there since he was born.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWith this year, I finished my 31st season department heading, and next season, if we come back, it\u2019ll be 32. It seems like yesterday that we all started there,\u201d Zakarian told IndieWire.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in the past couple of years, Zakarian and Mancuso have been able to really step up the ambition of what \u201cSNL\u201d can do over the course of the week, and especially what they can do over the course of a couple of days. If, say, an updated Weekend Update sketch now includes Dobby<\/a> the House Elf, for which Bowen Yang<\/a> would need a full face prosthetic as well as prosthetic gloves, that truly may have meant pulling an all-nighter and an all-dayer after that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Zakarian and the makeup team now have a 3D printer and a wealth of digital information, which makes the sculpting and molding process go much faster. \u201cThank goodness I was able to sculpt it digitally. I had Bowen\u2019s hands on file already, because we\u2019ve done hands for him before. So I was able to sculpt it digitally, throw them on the printers, go to the hotel for a few hours of sleep, come back in the morning, and the molds were printed and ready to go, and we could fill them up with silicone and paint them and have it ready for the show.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Part of onboarding each \u201cSNL\u201d host now is doing a face scan so that Zakarian can print any kind of prosthetics or facial hair, as soon as the team knows they need it. Likewise, the information helps Mancuso tailor wigs on what is sometimes very short notice, and the two departments collaborate incredibly closely to, say, transform Bad Bunny into a chatbot<\/a> companion (of sorts).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Benito hosted this year, with [the ChatGPTio sketch], he not only had the receding hairline and the wig, but then we also made a little potbelly for him,\u201d Zakarian said. \u201cWe made a little silicon belly that would go on a T-shirt, and as soon as he saw that, he was sporting that thing. He was enjoying it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The hosts enjoy the looks, but Mancuso and the hair team have to be very disciplined about tracking what wigs they have at their disposal, buying or changing what they need quickly, and how much they can dare to store in what is, after all, still an office building \u2014\u00a0even though \u201cSNL\u201d has converted a couple of floors of Rockefeller Center for their use. If the hair team were actually able to keep everything they make across seasons, they\u2019d need a \u201cRaiders of the Lost Ark\u201d amount of storage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI have an archive of stock wigs, and we try to keep everything. It could be a character from a cast member that hasn\u2019t been there in 25 years, and you\u2019re like, \u2018All right, I need to use this wig,\u2019 and I\u2019ll cut it or something for another host last-minute, in the middle of a Friday pre-tape. And without fail, that thing will come back next year or next week,\u201d Mancuso said of the dilemma of reusing wigs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like they know that we\u2019ve done that,\u201d Zakarian joked. \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, I think they just got rid of something. Quick, write that in.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mancuso rolls with the changes by trying to make sure she always knows exactly what she has among the over 3,000 wigs at \u201cSNL\u201d and exactly what it would take to make what the writers want. Especially because what a sketch wants, to be really funny, can sometimes scale. Mancuso went from needing five or six bobs for the Bob Army sketch this season to needing 14 and one for a dog \u2014 technically doable, but still a big lift to figure out exactly how to coordinate and build what\u2019s needed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have to build my wigs. We have a wig shop in-house because you can\u2019t call a vendor at 3 a.m. and say, \u2018Oh, they\u2019re going to play this crazy character. You have to build this wig on this turnaround.\u2019 We have to do it all ourselves,\u201d Mancuso said. \u201cEverything is a, \u2018Oh, wouldn\u2019t it be funny if there was a sniffing dog that had a bob?\u2019 And you\u2019re like, \u2018Well, I hope that I can find you one.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSNL\u201d Season 51 is one of the most ambitious seasons yet for the hair and makeup teams, doing really involved pretapes with cadres of orcs and Vikings, involved prosthetic builds, and especially a lot of riffs on iconic-looking IP like Dobby or \u201cHome Alone\u201d that the \u201cSNL\u201d team has to get right. It\u2019s for these cases that both physical and digital archives are key.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a mold room where I store all my molds, and every year, in the fall when we go back, I go through that mold room, and there\u2019s at least two or three dumpsters full of molds that we shatter and destroy. In the 30-some-odd years I\u2019ve been there, it would be like being in \u2018Indiana Jones\u2019 if we kept everything,\u201d Zakarian said. \u201cWe digitally scan everything now, though, so in an emergency I can throw the file to the print lab. A \u200acouple of gigabytes on a hard drive is a lot easier to store.\u201d <\/p>\n

Storage may have gotten easier, but what\u2019s remained constant is that the \u201cSNL\u201d hair and makeup teams have collaborated so fruitfully for so long. \u201cWe understand what each other can do and try to help each other out as much as we can with the time restraints that we have. There\u2019s definitely no ego involved, thank God, because it takes a village to do what we do, and we really all get excited when the other person\u2019s thing looks good,\u201d Mancuso said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gets crazy, but we love it,\u201d Zakarian agreed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt keeps us young!\u201d Mancuso added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which is not bad at all for \u201cSNL\u201d over 50.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d airs on NBC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The turnaround on \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d is famously brutal. Technically, the production staff have Sunday and Monday off,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[106957,61,60,211075,80,30447,282],"class_list":["post-491411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-bowen-yang","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-saturday-night-light","tag-technology","tag-top-of-the-line","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}