How the ‘Saturday Night’ hair and makeup team transformed the cast into the Not Ready for Primetime Players

Janine Rath-Thompson and Tricia Sawyer, the hair and makeup department heads, respectively, on Jason Reitman’s new film “Saturday Night” have been friends for years and collaborators in one capacity or another since 1991’s “Where Sleeping Dogs Lie.” But the real-time comedy thriller about the first-ever episode of “Saturday Night Live” is the first time they’ve gotten to work together in several years. 

“We were talking about it before we were even realizing we were talking about it,” hair department head Thompson tells Gold Derby. “We were just making plans already. It just came naturally to discuss each character. We’d sit at night and have a conversation and glass wine and talk about what we were going to do. It was super easy for our collaboration.”

Based on interviews Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan conducted with every living original “Saturday Night Live” cast member as well as several members of the crew and anyone else involved in the first “SNL” broadcast, “Saturday Night” unfolds in real-time from 10 p.m. ET on Saturday, October 11, 1975, to 11:30 p.m. ET, when Chevy Chase uttered the immortal words, “Live, from New York, it’s Saturday night.” The film primarily focuses on “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels (played in the film by Gabriel LaBelle), but every character – from Chase to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi to Gilda Radner and even Billy Crystal – is given a moment or two to make an impact on screen. That meant Rath-Thompson and Sawyer had to make sure the entire main cast, all 25 actors who receive solo title cards in the closing credits, were camera-ready every single day.

“And that doesn’t even account for all of the crew and all the people that were on all of the stages, all the background people,” Rath-Thompson says. “And we did it every day because Jason wanted to add people constantly crossing through the scene and doing things just to make it look frenetic. It was a lot, but we got it down to a machine.”

Beyond the logistical challenges, of course, there were several artistic ones as well. For every actor in the cast who physically resembled their famous character (Cory Michael Smith, for instance, passed as Chase with little embellishments beyond his sideburns), others required more hair and makeup work.

“We did a lot of research, and we basically compiled tons of photos of the real actors and the actors that they were portraying and just started from there,” Sawyer explains. “It became, ‘What do we do to achieve this look?’ It just started with that practical aspect to it.”

In the case of turning actress Ella Hunt into Gilda Radner, the goal was to blend Hunt’s look with Radner’s standout attributes: her famous hair and her distinctive eyebrows.

“Ella’s just gorgeous. And Gilda Radner was beautiful as well, but not in a classic way like Ella is. And so there was a lot of pressure because her hair was what was going to really sell the transformation,” Rath-Thompson says. “Getting the right texture on the wig was the hardest part. I got this beautiful wig from Natasha Ladik that had unbelievable curls and I had to brush it out and make it a little bit frizzy and not nearly as pretty – just make it more of a real girl. And the moment we put it on her, it just kind of came together.”

For her part, Sawyer worked on Hunt’s eyebrows – convincing the actress to shave them off to help Sawyer create Radnor’s signature look.

“When I looked at Gilda Radnor, she had these great, very round, very thin eyebrows, and Ella has beautiful, thick bushy, fabulous eyebrows. So I didn’t want to pluck her eyebrows because I didn’t want to hurt the follicle – because they potentially wouldn’t grow out the same again,” Sawyer says. “So I talked her into allowing me to shave them, and she was so game and so great about it. We shaved them and we redrew them in, and it worked out great.”

That attention to detail and care with the performers extended through the entire cast, according to Sawyer and Rath-Thompson, particularly with how their work together was able to subtly evoke the pressure and passage of time within the 90 minutes that the story takes place.

“That was one of the things Jason was really adamant about: How do I see the complete destruction of these people? They’re coming apart. They’re terrified How are we going to show that?” Rath-Thompson says. “So it took a lot to find places where we could show it.”

“Saturday Night” is out in theaters now.