(Credit: Montclair Film)
Mon 29 September 2025 1:00, UK
For the claustrophobic actors out there, signing up for a big fantasy or horror role comes with the dreaded make-up chair, as Jeff Daniels once found out all too horribly.
In the digital age, transformations can largely be created in post well after photography is over. But for the best part of eighty years, since cinema’s dawn, many stars would endure the hours-long process of applying thick coats of prosthetic to play whatever abomination was needed for the shoot, be it Lon Chaney’s silent monsters of the 1920s, or Jeff Goldblum’s rubbery mummification for the mutoid insect’s deterioration in The Fly.
To specifically make moulds to fit on one’s face, an actor has to spend some time with their head wrapped in hot plaster, with only their nostrils free to breathe for about ten minutes. The more Zen of Hollywood may well be able to ride such psychological duress; however, it has been known for people to panic and demand to rip off the hardening cast in a bout of anxiety.
Finding out the hard way, comedian Kevin Nealon was struck with such terror, preparing to impersonate The Tonight Show host Jay Leno for a Saturday Night Live skit in the early 1990s.
“I didn’t think I’d have a problem,” Nealon confessed on the Whiskey Ginger podcast in 2021. “I started panicking, getting lightheaded, and I told them ‘take it off’… the next thing I remember, he had smelling salts, and I woke up. He goes ‘you’re all right, yeah?’… All was not lost. Keeping his hands outside the plastic and turning the radio way up so he wasn’t entirely entombed in plaster, Nealon wavered on the cusp of anxiety once again but soldiered on, eventually managing that all-important Leno mould.
Not long after, it was Daniels’ turn. Hosting October 1991, Daniels too was to play the cursed late-night talk personality, resulting in a make-up horror story on the Friday before the show. Going through the plaster cast process as normal, the hardening material stuck to his stubble, eyebrows, and eyelashes, with a frenzied SNL crew attempting to relieve the pain and discomfort by pouring in cold water, to no avail. Trapped with a plaster mask for an hour, had he vomited, he could have died.
Calling producer Lorne Michaels, an urgent arrangement of his plastic surgery friends to head to Manhattan’s Studio, where SNL is filmed, to take drastic measures was underway. “They bring a little kit of X-acto knives with them, and so they pull the mask away from Jeff’s face,” Nealon recounted. “They lower the exact knife in there and they slowly cut his eyebrows off from the plaster […] they got to cut the eyelashes and then they pull it all the way down… now it’s stuck to his beard… they got to give him shots of novocaine all the way down as they’re pulling it to numb his skin…”
Showing up for work the next day, a red, blotchy Daniels, missing eyelashes and brows, met his hosting duties as scheduled. Annoyed? According to Nealon, Daniels took the whole sorry episode in his stride: “You know, I think he was just like ‘holy cow, that was crazy’… such a patient, Midwestern Michigan guy, I guess”.
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