Faces only a master of disguise could love
By Matthew Halverson
Photographs courtesy of Jeffrey Lewis
After tiring of the Hollywood grind, makeup artist Jeff Lewis has been back in his hometown of Edwardsville for more than a year now, but he’s still keeping busy with a makeup consultant business and work on the occasional movie. And before you write off this eight-year vet of the Star Trek franchise as just another nerd, consider this: He’s negotiating a deal that would have him plying his trade for a government agency. Ethan Hunt, eat your heart out.
As a warm-up for yet another year of applying Halloween makeup to St. Louisans (www.jeffreylewismakeup.com), we asked him to take a look back at his decade-long career of monster mashing. These are some of his favorites.
Yeti: 2006 Winter Olympics commercial
Conditions in the mountains of Utah made filming the TV spot difficult—blizzards shut down the shoot, an unruly snowmobile dumped the crew, subzero temperatures nearly froze Lewis to death—but the actor who played this snowboarder-hunting yeti was plenty comfy. “He was perfect all day because he was in that fur suit,” Lewis says. “All I had to do was brush some snow off of him.” The suit was perfect for some post-shoot fun, too, as Lewis and his hirsute friend snuck up on unsuspecting skiers that night: “We were just happy no one had a gun.”
Andorian: Stark Trek: Enterprise
This noodle-noggined alien may only look like a white wig and blue paint, but it actually took nearly four hours to create—every day. Lewis took a simple design from the original Star Trek series and jazzed it up for Enterprise, giving the blue skin an added layer of depth and iciness. And those antennae? Hardly the lifeless tubes of rubber you might expect from the Captain Kirk era, Lewis says: “They were animatronic. Whenever the character got mad, they’d flip back, or if someone came up behind him, they’d flip around to look.”
Siren: Aquaman pilot
A fierce fanboy following, ongoing references in Entourage and a record number of downloads on iTunes weren’t enough to save the CW’s proposed Aquaman series (a.k.a Mercy Reef), but the pilot did offer Lewis one of his most challenging assignments: He had to turn the comely Adrianne Palicki into this beastly siren. The six-hour process called for prosthetic appliances on her hands, chest, shoulders, back and butt; Palicki didn’t exactly bond well with her new skin—but then it didn’t care for her either, Lewis says. “With her being in salt water all the time, it was a nightmare just trying to keep the makeup on,” which, considering she was naked underneath, was a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen.
Orion Slave Trader: Star Trek: Enterprise
Applying a couple layers of green paint to your average 6-foot Orion slave trader? Piece of cake. Applying it to Big Show, the 7-foot, 500-pound WWE wrestler who played this character? Not so much. “We had to bring in the industrial airbrushes that you use to paint cars,” Lewis says. And then there was the whole “streaky green giant” issue: “At 500 pounds, he sweats sitting still,” Lewis says. “I had to bring a box fan from home to keep him cool between shots.” Not so amusing irony: Removing the paint at the end of the day took more than an hour of scrubbing in the shower—by Lewis and another makeup artist.
