Emily Schubert

EO

I’ve been thinking about your book, Beauty of the Beast, because while it’s ostensibly about makeup, I don’t think that's actually the subject. I kept coming back to everything else you’ve done, and I realized that collaboration seems to be at the center of your entire practice, it’s paramount. Does that live in the realm of truth for you?

ES

I love that. I actually think that’s true. When I think about makeup, I don’t really think about cosmetics at all. I think about the last detail. By the time I arrive, there are already hundreds of hours of work inside a film. The costumes are finished, the production design is finished, the lighting is as it will be, and then the 1st AD (assistant director) calls “last looks.” That’s where makeup enters. You’re making these tiny adjustments right before the camera rolls, but those adjustments determine whether the audience stays inside the story or suddenly notices the performance. If you zoom in on someone’s face and it doesn’t feel like the way that character would actually treat themselves—if their eyebrows are overdone, their makeup is too heavy, or something doesn’t belong—you lose the illusion. It’s like a bad internet connection. For a second everything gets fuzzy, and the audience comes out of the story. My job is to prevent that from happening.

EO

Can you talk about what drove you to make the book? What is it about for you?

ES

What’s interesting to me is that there are already so many tutorials online teaching people how to do makeup on themselves. I wasn’t interested in making another version of that. The book is about doing makeup on somebody else. The makeup chair is really a portal. Someone walks into the room as themselves, and when they leave they’re ready to be photographed, filmed…immortalized. That’s always been what makeup is to me. The reason I wanted to make the book is because I worry that part of the craft is becoming a lost art. Between CGI, filters, and everyone learning how to do their own makeup online in a flipped mirror, we’re slowly losing the bedside manner that comes with filmmaking and photography. That’s the thing I wanted to preserve—not products or techniques, but the relationship itself.

EO

“Bedside manner,” is such a beautiful phrase because people usually associate it with medicine, not filmmaking.

ES

But that’s really how I think about it. Bedside manner is about making room for somebody else. When someone sits in the chair, I ask them what they like about their face, what they naturally like to emphasize, what products they use, and whether another makeup artist ever showed them something they’ve carried with them ever since. There’s this incredible transfer of knowledge that happens before you’ve even started working. That’s what I love about doing makeup on another person. You’re not arriving with all the answers. You’re learning how someone already understands themselves, and then the work grows out of that. The relationship comes first; then the makeup follows.

EO

The way you describe this way of working almost sounds like it’s inevitable. But where did it actually come from? When did makeup stop being something you were interested in and become the way you understood making?

ES

I started doing makeup professionally for the camera at 15. My brother had a friend who went to the New York Film Academy, and I did makeup on all of his projects. Then, before classes had even started at Wesleyan, I emailed a professor in the film department and asked him to forward my information to every senior making a thesis film because I did special effects makeup. It turned out to be this incredible niche because I immediately had something very specific that people needed. By the time I graduated, I’d worked on films all across campus, and those students became my first professional network beyond college.

EO

What do you think drew you to special effects in particular? Were you looking at other artists, or were you pulling from somewhere else entirely?

ES

A lot of it came from my dad. He’s a retinal surgeon, and he films some of his cases with a laparoscopic lens, so when I was growing up there were always eye surgeries playing on the television. I remember watching them and wondering how I could recreate them. He is always thinking about lenses, perspective, and looking closely, even if that isn’t how he would describe it. I think that probably shaped the way I learned to see. Special effects makeup was really just another way of recreating a kind of reality, even if it was a gruesome one.

EO

What made makeup the thing that stayed with you?

ES

Because it felt like the most precise place to enter a film. By the time makeup arrives, everything else has already been built. You’re making one final adjustment before the camera rolls, but that tiny decision can determine whether a character feels believable. Again, the work isn’t about adding more, it’s about making sure nothing breaks the illusion.

EO

Where do you encounter the character in your process? When do you meet them? Is it in the script, in the makeup chair, or is it something you begin to conceptualize before for yourself?

ES

It always begins with the script. I’m trying to understand who this person is and how they move through the world. A script tells you how somebody behaves in the world, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what happens when they’re alon. Makeup starts asking a different set of questions. How much time do they spend getting ready? Are they meticulous? Do they forget to look in the mirror? Are they trying to hide or emphasize a specific feature?? Those details usually aren’t written into the screenplay, but they’re still part of the character. Then I want to talk to the director about who they had in mind while they were writing the character because there are usually things that never make it onto the page. But a lot of the information actually comes from the actor. I spend a lot of time talking to them about who they think the character is. I see myself as a translator. I’m not necessarily interested in imposing my own style. I’m trying to pull something out of the actor that already exists. Makeup is not something you simply place on another person. They have to activate it. Then it’s photographed by somebody else, lit by somebody else, and shaped by everyone else on set. That’s why I’ve never thought of makeup as an isolated practice. It’s always been one part of a much larger collaboration.

EO

That idea of translation feels important because it also explains why your work never really stopped at makeup. You were just finding different ways to participate in the same process.

ES

Makeup was simply the first language I learned. The thing I’ve always loved is fleshing out ideas. That’s why moving into wardrobe, fabrication, or product design never felt like changing careers. They were all different ways of solving the same problem.

EO

It also explains why your collaborations look the way they do now. From the outside, people see SOPHIE, Matthew Barney, Sean Price Williams, Daniel Lopatin, Devonté Hynes, Charlie Fox—but it seems like the real continuity isn't the people. It’s that you’re always entering someone else’s world while it's still taking shape.

ES

That’s always been the part I’ve loved most. There’s no greater pleasure than talking to somebody who’s completely consumed by an idea. They’re trying to describe a world that only exists in their head, and they’re inviting you into it before anybody else has seen it. It almost feels like they’re blindfolded, reaching out in front of themselves, trying to find the edges of something they can’t quite articulate yet. Sometimes all you can do is ask, “Is this what you mean?” or “Is this what you're feeling?” Those are always the most rewarding collaborations because you’re discovering the work together instead of simply executing a plan.

EO

SOPHIE feels like the clearest example of that because she wasn’t asking you to make a dress. She was trying to figure out who SOPHIE was.

ES

When we met, she was still becoming SOPHIE. We’d trade references back and forth, look at fabrics, and little by little this visual language started to emerge. The first time we worked together I was helping with her costume changes between songs. She was wearing this latex look, and I remember saying, “What if the last outfit felt like Carrie at the prom? What if it was just completely red and trailing on the floor?” She immediately understood what I meant, and from there I started making custom dresses with Coco. None of it felt like costume design in the traditional sense. It felt like helping another person give physical form to an identity that was still taking shape.

EO

That dress has stayed with me. It feels much more like an object than a costume. Can you talk about making it together?

ES

For the cover of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, she wanted every track to have its own material and its own reference, so the dress became a way of holding the entire album together. Each fabric corresponded to a different song, and the dress became this single object that contained all of those different worlds at once. She’d studied sculpture, so she naturally thought through materials and structure, but she was also deeply committed to collaboration. She brought in Ciaran Moore to develop fabrics for each song, and she trusted everyone she invited into the process, which made us trust each other.

I remember building the bustle out of chicken wire, weaving LED lights through it, wrapping it in this thin iridescent fabric, and then draping PVC on top so the whole skirt seemed to glow from within. Charlotte Wales made the water out of india ink, baby oil and water so it slowly degraded and dyed the fabrics, softening the PVC in particular. That was pretty amazing—the materials changing the object over the course of the shoot. I think SOPHIE brought out the best work in everyone around her because she understood that authorship didn’t have to be solitary.

EO

It’s funny because I don’t think I’d realized this until now, but all of the people you’ve mentioned today are trying to build complete worlds. SOPHIE. Matthew Barney. Sean Price Williams. Dan Lopatin. Devonté Hynes. Charlie Fox. They’re obviously making very different kinds of work, but they’re all obsessed with creating an internal logic that extends through everything they make.

ES

I think that’s exactly what I’m attracted to. Once someone has built that kind of world, every decision starts making sense because it belongs to the same internal logic. That’s what made working with someone like SOPHIE so exciting. Every material, every reference, every image belonged to the same universe. The medium changes, but the commitment is always the same. Those are the people I want to spend my time with because they’re not asking you to decorate an idea. They’re asking you to help uncover it.

EO

So where does this way of working actually begin? You knew you wanted to work in film, but you were also moving toward makeup, special effects, architecture, and design all at once. What were you responding to before you had a language for any of it?

ES

When I was a teenager, I idolized Bobbi Brown and Klaus Nomi. I got a Bobbi Brown book for Christmas, and it completely changed the way I thought about beauty. She had studied stage makeup through Emerson’s film program, so I thought, “Oh, I’m going to study film.” I even looked at the stage makeup program at USC. I’m very glad I didn’t do that, but at the time it felt like the clearest path into the world I wanted to enter. And with Klaus Nomi, I thought, “Where does the character end and Klaus Sperber begin?”

EO

What was the distinction you were making between stage makeup and movie makeup?

ES

Movie makeup is immortal. Once you capture something on film, it exists forever. Theater is beautiful in a completely different way because you feel everyone else in the room, and the performance can change every night. Film is more like catching lightning in a bottle. You’re preparing someone for a single moment that can never happen in exactly the same way again.

EO

What did you think makeup could do that made you want to build your life around it?

ES

There’s a moment after I finish someone’s makeup when they look in the mirror, and I try to catch their face before they have time to compose themselves. That moment makes the whole thing worth it to me. It’s the realization that there was more possibility in the way they could look than they had imagined. I could cry thinking about it because it’s so vulnerable. You’re not just showing somebody a new face; you’re giving them another way of seeing themselves again for the first time.

EO

Can you remember a moment when that became particularly clear?

ES

I did makeup for the Pornhub Awards in 2018 and Richard Kern was photographing the twenty-five most popular performers. A lot of them were accustomed to wearing an enormous amount of makeup for the camera, so I did this very restrained, no-makeup makeup instead. One of the women looked in the mirror and said, “I look like a baby. I’ve never seen myself like this before.” That killed me. I wasn’t replacing what was already there. I was drawing out the features she already had and emphasizing the things I thought were already beautiful.

EO

So even then, it wasn’t really about transformation. It was about recognition.

ES

That’s what makeup is to me when we’re talking about beauty. It’s also why I love doing weddings for my friends, even though I don’t do them professionally. You meet both families, you meet the mothers, and you understand the whole emotional structure of the wedding before the ceremony has even happened. By the time everyone is ready to walk down the aisle, I feel like I’ve already attended the wedding.

EO

It’s interesting because everything you’ve described is about seeing people differently. But instead of going to school for makeup, you applied to Wesleyan as a math major.

ES

I’m the daughter of an immigrant. What can I say? I wasn’t allowed to go to college to study makeup. I applied as a math major because I genuinely loved math, but I also knew Wesleyan had a strong film department and that I wanted to work in movies.

EO

So before classes had even started, you’d already written yourself into everyone else’s projects.

ES

It was the greatest thing. Everyone had these small projects they were trying to make, and if you treated them as seriously as your coursework—or, in my case, more seriously than my coursework—they became completely real. There were ideas everywhere, and I loved being able to grab onto one and help someone make it tangible. By the time I was a senior, my film major friends were actually writing projects around what I could do. One of my best friends made a boxing film because he knew I could do the injuries. Someone else made a monster film because they knew I could build the creature. I became a creative resource for the people around me, and I loved that I didn’t have to choose only one world to participate in.

EO

It’s funny because you’ve spent this entire conversation talking about details, but every detail you’ve mentioned is emotional.

ES

They are. The way someone’s hair wraps through a hoop earring can make you cry if it feels completely right. Those are the details that suddenly make you recognize a person. Even with special effects, a monster isn’t frightening unless there’s still something human inside it. Maybe the eyes remain recognizable, or there’s some expression that you can identify in yourself. If the creature feels completely alien, it loses some of its power. The horror comes from seeing enough of yourself in it.

EO

You were already deeply inside filmmaking, so how did studying architecture come into existence?

ES

Architecture felt like the grandfather of design, in essence it's a kind of visual math. I thought that if I wanted to design anything, it would give me the strongest possible foundation—and the vocabulary to explain my decisions. I was also deeply interested in typography. David Schorr, who headed the art department at Wesleyan, gave the most influential class I took there. He approached design as the process of finding a solution. The question was always, “What is the solution?” I’ve carried that way of thinking into everything I’ve made since.

EO

So architecture gave you a vocabulary for what you were already doing intuitively.

ES

Architecture felt like the grandfather of design. I thought that if I wanted to design anything, it would give me the strongest possible foundation—and the vocabulary to explain why a decision worked. I was also deeply interested in typography. David Schorr, who taught in the art department at Wesleyan, gave the most influential class I took there. He approached design as the process of finding a solution. The question was always, “What is the solution?” I’ve carried that way of thinking into everything I’ve made since.

EO

So, in theory, your education and your career were basically happening at the same time.

ES

During fall break I would come back to New York and work on commercials and shorts because the seniors I’d met as a freshman had already graduated and entered the industry. By the time I finished Wesleyan, I had four years of relationships with people working in commercials and independent film, and they started hiring me immediately. There was never a clean separation between school and work. I was learning systems and design in class and then testing those ideas on actual shoots. One side gave me the language, and the other gave me somewhere to apply it.

EO

Did you ever consider becoming a creative director and pursuing a more conventional commercial career? 

ES

Yes, for a while in college I thought I would work in advertising. Again, David Schorr had taught us about typography, branding, and graphic design, and I loved all of it. I spent a summer at Mother New York as a design intern, and I became fascinated by products and the way a brand could define an entire worldview. That eventually became Fur because it brought all of those interests together. I wasn’t interested in making another beauty product. I wanted to reorganize the meaning around something people already thought they understood.

At the time, every women’s care product was designed to be shoved underneath the bathroom sink. None of it was supposed to sit on the counter as a beautiful object. Wax strips, sprays—all of it was buried and presented through this language of embarrassment and concealment. The idea behind Fur was that a product for pubic hair could be something elegant enough to leave on your dresser. You could be proud of it rather than treating it as evidence of something shameful. It was an accessory to your body instead of a correction of it. That approach felt completely absent from the market when we began.

EO

What made the branding feel so radical at the time?

ES

This was 2015, before Hims, Hers, Billie—any of that. I have heard that Fur became one of the references those companies were using, and you could see pieces of the language begin to appear elsewhere: the naming, the typography, even the idea that personal-care products could be designed as objects rather than hidden necessities. Carlos Sanchez, who I met in David Schorr’s class, and I designed the Fur logo in Big Caslon and altered the letters so the F and the R looked almost like drops of oil. On the back of the packaging, I arranged the typography into a triangle so it subtly formed a bush. The packaging referenced old Chanel boxes, but the object itself was doing something more. It was also important that “pubic” was right on the cover. I’m proud of it.

EO

Can you tell me about the design logic of the bottle? 

ES

I wanted the bottle to feel organic and bodily—almost like you were cupping a breast, a butt, or a pair of balls in your hand. I was told that, from a traditional marketing perspective, it made no sense because it was an orb. In business school, you’re taught to design packaging that makes people think they’re getting more product than they actually are, and a sphere does the opposite. I didn’t care. I cared whether somebody would remember it. For lack of a better word, being “iconic” mattered more to me than following those kinds of marketing schemes.

EO

How did the final design come to mind? 

ES

I bought an antique bottle at Housing Works on 96th Street while I was researching what Fur’s packaging could look like. At first, I was studying the bottle itself, thinking about it as the reference. It had the kind of traditional glass perfume stopper cap—a round glass top with a narrow piece of glass meant to fit snugly into the neck of the bottle. Then one day, I took the cap off, turned it upside down, and held it in my hand. I looked at it and suddenly realized, “This is the Fur bottle.” The shape I’d been searching for wasn’t the body of the antique bottle at all—it was the cap. I was twenty-four when that happened, and I remember thinking, This is Fur.

Then the first batch of oil came back this beautiful chartreuse green, and it made some people uncomfortable. I kept hearing, “It has to be pink,” because that was what a product for women was supposed to look like. But I looked at it and thought, “No, this is our brand color.” The green came naturally from the ingredients, and that was really the thesis of Fur. You take what comes naturally to your body, and your comfort with what is natural becomes elegance. Changing the oil to make it more conventionally feminine would’ve contradicted the entire project. Those are my favorite moments in design, when something suddenly reveals what it was always supposed to be.

EO

Where did the idea for Fur itself begin?

ES

I was working for Rushka Bergman, who was Michael Jackson’s stylist and worked with Vogue Italia. Rushka thought almost entirely through shape and color. She had this incredibly consistent internal rubric for everything she chose.

EO

What did that experience teach you about fashion?

ES

Rushka is real artist, but as for the fashion industry, there was also something about the pursuit of cool that felt misplaced. Fashion is so often about wanting to look cool, and there’s nothing cool about wanting to look cool. I could understand the internal system and execute it, but I didn’t necessarily want to live inside it forever. I loved clothes, but I didn’t love what I saw of fashion as an industry. I was much more interested in using clothing to build a character or to help a musician create a world. And film sets are fun.

EO

And somewhere inside all of that, Fur begins to emerge.

ES

At the time the fashion was brazilian waxes across the board.  It was presented as this glamorous, fashionable ritual, but one day, at the end of the appointment, they handed me the little mirror they give you to inspect the work. I held it up, and my technician walked behind me at exactly that moment. We made eye contact in the reflection while I was looking at my completely naked body, and I remember thinking, “This is insane.” It was a genuinely uncomfortable experience, and it was the only possible standard. I left knowing that this wasn’t going to remain the norm forever. The whole culture around it felt cooked.

EO

What changed once you started researching the alternatives?

ES

Well, I started by googling “pubic hair,” and the only autofill suggestion was “removal.” I did learn that Marilyn Monroe used to bleach her pubic hair with a toothbrush to match the hair on her head. Something about that completely shifted the frame for me. Pubic hair could be treated as an elegant accessory rather than something that needed to be removed. Marilyn was the blueprint for conventional glamour, and she wasn’t approaching her body through shame. That became the idea: people could do whatever they wanted, including getting a Brazilian, but it shouldn’t feel like the only acceptable option. Almost a decade later, an assistant on a film set told me she and all of her friends used Fur in college because it made them feel like having pubic hair was okay. That meant everything to me because that was the whole point. The product was never really about oil. It was about permission.

EO

And is that when you first started thinking about taking authorship seriously? 

ES

My first job after college was fabricating sculptures for Paola Pivi. It was the summer of 2013, and we were working on these enormous taxidermy polar bears shipped all the way from the Yukon Territory. We covered them in feathers bought in bulk from feather boas, which, by the way, are dyed turkey feathers. Because of my makeup background, I became the face specialist. I studied the direction the fur grew around the eyes and recreated it feather by feather. You could only use the tips of the feathers, applied with tweezers, and you could never touch them because the oil from your fingers would separate the filaments. The feathers would blow everywhere, so we couldn’t use fans or air conditioning. It was July in New York, and you could just feel the sweat rolling down your face as you performed this incredibly precise work. At night, when I would blow my nose, my snot was always the color of the bear I was working on.

One night, there was an after-party at the Russian Tea Room, and I showed up and discovered I wasn’t on the list. I was twenty-three, and I kept thinking, “But I made those.” Pharrell was there, all these people were there, and I couldn’t understand why the people who had physically produced the sculptures weren’t considered part of the work. It was the first time I confronted the distance between the artist and the object. After that, I became fascinated by art fabrication because it forced me to ask what actual making was worth and how far authorship could be removed from the hands that brought something into existence.

EO

It’s so real. The absence of those who labored for the product or experience is endlessly fascinating for me, because you still don’t bypass any of it in white collar jobs either. You still will be excluded. Can you talk about styling Devonté Hynes’ Better Than Me video shoot in 2016 with Carly Rae Jepsen? Was that your first time working with him?

ES

It was, which is crazy because that’s where you and I met too. I had about two thousand dollars for the entire wardrobe budget, so I went to Goodwill and bought everything secondhand. I probably spent fifteen hundred dollars there and used the rest to hire an on-set tailor. We altered everything directly onto the performers that morning, so it looked and moved in a way that was completely specific to them. I loved that the money went toward the handmade part of the process rather than overnighting expensive clothes from a showroom. It was the exact opposite of how I’d worked with Rushka, where everything depended on whether the DHL package had arrived. We were taking discarded clothes and using somebody’s skill to make them work.

EO

How did those collaborations begin multiplying?

ES

A lot of it came through my friends Imogene Strauss and Sara’o Bery, both of whom I’d gone to Wesleyan with. Through Imogene, I met Eliza Ryan, and that really made my career during those first few years. They brought me onto film sets and into projects when they needed someone who could move between production design, styling, fabrication, and makeup. They gave me opportunities, but I made those jobs happen once I got there. My reputation became: whatever the problem was, I’d figure it out.

EO

What did “figuring it out” actually look like?

ES

Mostly problem-solving. Usually there wasn’t enough time or enough money, and somebody needed something that didn’t exist yet. On one of Josh Kline’s videos, I was tasked to recreate the inaugural suits and ties of all the American presidents so face-doubling software could be layered over the actors. I was preparing to hand-paint polka dots onto a tie because I couldn’t find the right one anywhere. Then I walked into Macy’s and saw every tie I needed lined up neatly together in Donald Trump’s collection. His tie line was basically a collection of ties that past American presidents had worn at their inaugurations, this was 2016. Those were the kinds of bizarre solutions the work constantly demanded. I liked being the person who could arrive, understand what needed to happen, and make it happen. If I knew somebody genuinely appreciated what I brought to the work, I’d go to almost any limit for them because they understood I wasn’t just completing a task. I was bringing a way of thinking to the project.

EO

Is that part of why Hollywood never appealed to you?

ES

I think so. I wanted to be an artist people collaborated with. The idea of sitting in a makeup trailer supervising other makeup artists never interested me because, to me, the work is in the hand. It’s the touch, the bedside manner, the intimacy of actually doing it yourself. I grew up in a very hand-centered household. My father is a surgeon and my mother is a harpist. Hands were understood as incredibly valuable because they were the instruments through which both of them worked. I think I was always afraid Hollywood would separate me from that part of the process and turn the work into management instead of making.

EO

You were also hand modeling during that period, which somehow feels connected to all of this.

ES

It really was. Hand modeling let me be in front of the camera without fully being in front of the camera. It gave me the experience of being the talent, and that actually made me much better at doing makeup because I understood what someone needed in those exposed moments. You become aware of how strange it is to be watched, adjusted, and expected to perform while people move around you. That made me much more sensitive to the person sitting in my chair. It also paid surprisingly well, which supported everything else I was doing.

EO

The hands keep coming back.

ES

They really do. I worked in the woodshop in college too, training people to use the table saws and band saws. Somebody would come in with an idea, and I’d help them figure out how to make it. That’s exactly what I love about art fabrication. An artist says, “How do I do this?” and then you solve the puzzle together. You aren’t simply carrying out instructions. You’re discovering what the object can become through the act of making it.

EO

Earlier you caught yourself replacing the word money with value. That felt important.

ES

Because that’s really what I meant. I was watching things we’d made sell for enormous amounts of money, and at first the whole system felt unreal. Now I’m older and I understand the money is very real. But what I was actually questioning was how value gets assigned—to an idea, to the person whose name is attached to it, and to the people whose hands made it possible. My life was never organized around money as the bottom line, even though I obviously needed it to live. I was much more interested in the value of ideas and handiwork. That distinction shaped the people I wanted to work with and the projects I was willing to give everything to.

EO

Fur launches in 2016, you begin working with Dev, and all of these collaborations that define the next several years start taking shape and now almost seem inevitable. Did it feel that way while you were living it?

ES

Not at all. Honestly, I was pretty depressed at the time. I needed to distract myself, so I took every single job that came my way because I couldn’t sit still long enough to think. I ran for years. My apartment was always filled with whatever project I was working on, and the moment I cleared it out, another pile of clothes or materials would take its place. There was no master plan. At the time it felt much more like survival than ambition. I wasn’t trying to build a career. I was running for my life.

EO

When does Sean Price Williams enter the picture?

ES

Much later, during COVID. People had told me that Sean and I had a similar philosophy about filmmaking, and once we started working together, I understood what they meant. He cares obsessively about the last detail. I’ve never worked with anyone more concerned about a single strand of hair. If something looks stiff or false, he’ll stop and say, “I won’t roll on this.” Working with someone who cares in that way is gratifying because you know you're protecting the same illusion.

EO

Hollywood would seem to put you much farther away from that relationship.

ES

Everything becomes divided into departments, and eventually nobody’s taking complete creative responsibility. I love working with people who do. They have a point of view, and they’re willing to follow it through every decision instead of waiting for a committee to tell them what’s right. That kind of seriousness and creative responsibility raises the level of everybody else’s work. Of course there are exceptions, I am speaking quite generally.

EO

That actually makes me think about Matthew Barney. It’s such a strange trajectory. You’re sitting at Wesleyan watching The Cremaster Cycle, and then ten years later you’re standing in his studio.

ES

After school everyone was talking about graduate schools, and I remember I went home and searched, “Does Matthew Barney teach anywhere?” I thought that if I ever went to art school, I’d want to study with him. Then, in 2022, I found myself designing the makeup and costumes for one of his features.

EO

And then your first meeting begins with an X-ray.

ES

Which was even stranger. Matthew brought me into his office and started showing me the references he’d assembled for the video installation of his that I worked on, Secondary. He was thinking about paralysis, spinal cords, titanium implants, and all these very specific images of the body. Then I looked up and saw an X-ray of a Harrington rod that looked exactly like the one inside my own spine. I pointed at it and said, “I have that.”

EO

Almost like the collaboration had already started.

ES

I think the best collaborations often work that way. You spend years moving toward someone without realizing it, and then one day you’re in the same room discovering that you’ve been asking some of the same questions.

EO

Around that same time, Shaun McDonald introduced you to ANOHNI.

ES

Yes. I first worked with Arca on Halloween and made her into something that was supposed to look like a dog dressed as a mouse. She performed at the Public Theater, and I was dressed as George Washington that night. She pulled me onstage, and I started doing operatic runs beside her while she was this mouse-dog creature. Through Shaun, I also began working with Laurie Anderson and later with ANOHNI.

EO

What did working with Laurie Anderson require?

ES

She was preparing for an interview for 60 minutes with Anderson Cooper and had a pretty fresh scar on her face. I used a two-part silicone and made a stamp with skin texture so it disappeared into the rest of her face. The makeup had to withstand close-ups without looking like anything had been done at all. At one point she looked at me and said, “I’m like your puppet.” It was funny, but it also captured the trust involved. She was letting me temporarily alter the surface of her face because she believed I understood what she needed.

EO

Then you took a face cast of ANOHNI that she wore while singing in the Acropolis.

ES

Taking a face cast asks someone to surrender their sight, their movement, and even their ability to speak for a while. You’re covering their face and waiting together while the material sets. It’s another version of the makeup chair—an intimate space where someone has to trust your hands completely. The technical process matters, but the emotional responsibility matters just as much.

EO

The hand keeps reappearing throughout your work.

ES

I made a sculpture called Lady Fingers that came directly out of that. I cast my ring fingers and recreated them in the same foam latex used for makeup sponges, then individually wrapped them like a beauty product. The beauty industry encourages people to use sponges because they absorb product and make you buy more product, but your hands are actually the best tools you have. Foundation works better when the pigment acclimates to your body temperature before you press it into the skin, and the ring finger is the weakest finger, so it’s the best one to push pigment on with. That’s also why so much of Beauty of the Beast uses photographs of my own hands. The hand isn’t incidental to makeup. It’s where knowledge lives.

EO

You also collaborated with Alex Bag and Jason Yates around that work.

ES

Alex and I were included in a group show at von ammon co, and Todd von Ammon thought we’d love each other, which he was absolutely right about. Alex is a very important video artist, and there was an immediate affinity between us. Actually, the cover of Beauty of the Beast has her son Augie on it! I made costumes for a show she and Jason did over Covid, and Todd made a book about it with an introduction by Charlie Fox. Anyway that’s where I showed Lady Fingers. I liked that the work could be funny while also making a serious argument about consumption, touch, and the way the beauty industry loses its grip on the beautiful. Even though I’d made a sponge, it was a sponge shaped like the body part that should have made the sponge unnecessary. That contradiction felt connected to everything else I was making.

EO

Before COVID, you started working with Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) on the video for “Black Snow.”

ES

That was the first project I did with Dan. He had a vision of a post-apocalyptic world. I wanted to make the dancers look like McDonald’s, so they became these post-apocalyptic McDonald’s cowgirl Barbies. The set drew from Jon Rafman, and we used an N95 mask long before COVID made that image ubiquitous. I made cowboy hats inspired by novelty Rasta wigs, with caution-tape bows and blonde Dolly Parton curls hanging underneath. I put everyone in stockings that gave their legs this shiny, artificial Barbie quality with cheerleading shoes. I was doing special effects, wardrobe, and production design all at once because all of those things needed to belong to the same world. Dan understood that the strangeness had to be internally coherent. I actually ended up incorporating the white wig we used in that video for my George Washington costume I've worn every Halloween since.

EO

And the collaboration kept expanding.

ES

It did. I designed costumes for the Myriad tour, including the performances at the Park Avenue Armory and the Barbican. I also sang on the Uncut Gems soundtrack that he scored. That’s what I loved about working with Dan. We could move from prosthetics to costumes to music without any of it feeling like a different discipline. The medium was never really the point. It was world building through different forms.

EO

Then, during COVID, you, Daniel, Charlie Fox, and Ben Carey somehow ended up making the video for “Long Road Home.”

ES

It was basically a COVID love story. It was really just me, Ben, my friend Victoria, a stop-motion animator, for eleven days in the little studio room in my apartment. My co-director Charlie was on Zoom the whole time keeping the wheels on and making sure we stayed true to the story he and Dan wrote about a bat and a devil. That was something we could only have done during COVID because nobody had anywhere else to be. Dan wanted puppets, and we’d been talking about this Bob Dylan puppet as an early reference. I didn’t really know what I was going to do, so I started applying the same special-effects makeup and wardrobe techniques I normally use on people. We built parts of the set on a Lazy Susan and rotated them live while the puppets stayed suspended. Watching Victoria animate gave me exactly the same feeling I get when an actor activates makeup or a costume I’ve made. The body changed, but the relationship between the object and the performer didn’t.

EO

The medium changes, but the questions stay the same.

ES

During COVID, you couldn’t touch anyone’s face, so the puppets became another way of asking the same questions. I was still thinking about skin, hair, clothing, movement, and character. They still had to be operated by someone else, and I still had to watch what happened once the work left my hands. I’ve never really understood my practice through a medium. The materials change because the circumstances change. So yes, the questions stay the same.

EO

You’d already collaborated with Josh on a number of projects. How did you end up in Marty Supreme?

ES

I don’t think I would say collaborated. JP and Sarah reached out, and suddenly I was playing David Mamet’s costume designer. We were sitting in the audience while David played the director, and Miyako Bellizzi put me in this beautiful 1950s costume. What I really remember is that we shot at the Ritz Theatre in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which is where my grandmother, Mitzi, was from. I know she used to go to that very theater to watch movies and plays, and at one point I walked upstairs, looked in the mirror, and realized I was dressed exactly the way she would’ve dressed at my age. There are photographs of her standing outside that theater wearing similar clothes. I just remember thinking, “I’m in the building with Mitzi right now.” It was one of those moments where making something collapsed into memory, and it felt like she was there with me.

EO

I’m still thinking about what you said about follower count. It haunts me even though it's such a real construct.

ES

Years ago, an agency, told me I didn’t have enough followers, and more recently I was told the same thing. The truth is that I could have posted everything I’d ever done and probably made much more money. But turning every collaboration into proof of access would’ve changed the relationship and reception of the work that I do and the quality level I pursue. I never wanted people to feel that working with me meant their process would immediately be projected everywhere. There was an intimacy to the work that I wanted to preserve.

EO

What happened recently?

ES

I remember thinking, “I need to make money. Maybe I should finally do this in the most conventional way.” I’d done makeup for Bill Clinton, Playboi Carti, Susan Sarandon,Carol Kane, a diverse portfolio. I thought maybe I could make a living getting people ready for the red carpet. I met with a top makeup agent and brought her my book and the New York Magazine cover I did in 2024.

She picked up my book, turned to the chapter about old age makeup, and said, “My nightmare.” I knew immediately I was in the wrong place. She wasn’t talking about the artistry or what it meant to photograph an aging face with that kind of attention. She was just talking about looking old.

EO

I often think about the unspoken culture amongst our contemporaries on prioritizing integrity and artistry. We had this understanding that you didn’t blow everything up, some things are incredibly sacred.

ES

Right. You didn’t have to advertise every room you’d been in or every person you knew. The work could surface when it was ready, and sometimes people wouldn’t even know everything you’d contributed to. It wasn’t about being secretive. It protected the strange conditions that allowed something unexpected to happen. There was an unspoken understanding that the collaboration mattered more than proving you were there.

When New Yorkers make something, there are often five other projects developing underneath it that nobody knows about yet. You leave enough space for the weird thing to happen instead of constantly translating your life into publicity.

EO

How much of that comes from New York?

ES

A lot of it. The New York way of making things feels handmade. I always resented the phrase “below the line” because those are the people whose hands are all over the film. They’re the people getting dirty and physically producing the image. New York allows you to run and gun, and the entire city becomes the set. You walk outside and there’s a reptile next to someone solving a Rubik’s Cube, and you couldn’t invent that combination anywhere else if you tried. The faces are more interesting too because street casting still exists here. In Los Angeles, everything can start to feel removed, uniform, focus-grouped.

EO

There’s also the question of what happens to someone’s face once the industry begins asking them to standardize it.

ES

That’s tough. Actors are being paid to move their faces, and Botox interferes with the instrument they’re supposed to be using.  Asymmetry is part of what makes a face believable. Hollywood often seems to treat difference as something to correct instead of something to cast. That’s the opposite of everything I believe makeup should do.

EO

You see that same philosophy in the way Sean Price Williams made The Sweet East.

ES

Completely. Every department head received a point in the film, which was incredibly meaningful because none of us were being paid what we should have been. It made me feel like the film belonged to me too.

EO

That kind of ownership changes the meaning of collaboration.

ES

It acknowledges that everyone’s hands are on the finished work. Giving someone a point says their contribution has value beyond a day rate or a credit. It changes the atmosphere because everyone becomes invested in the life of the film. You’re not just there to finish your department and leave. You feel responsible for the whole thing. That’s what independent filmmaking can still make possible when people are willing to share authorship instead of protecting it.

EO

You’ve said you didn’t personally like Anora, but its success still meant something to you.

ES

It’s not that I disliked it. I just thought there was a real missed opportunity with Ivan’s mom’s makeup to make her into a fleshed out, credible woman. That PJ moment broke the illusion for me. Whether or not I liked the movie it felt like a win for New York independent film and for independent filmmaking more broadly. It proved that a film could be made outside the usual system and still travel that far. The fact that they broke through creates room for everybody else.

EO

That’s so real. It also explains why you became more selective about styling.

ES

After SOPHIE, some people came to me wanting to look like herI realized that her image wasn’t a recipe that could be transferred onto somebody else. It came out of conversation, trust, experimentation, and the very specific person she was becoming. Asking for the dress or the makeup without that relationship or context missed the point. It treated the result as a style that could be reproduced instead of the product of a sacred exchange.

EO

Because you weren’t trying to make somebody into SOPHIE. You were trying to help SOPHIE become more fully herself.

ES

That’s why copying the surface felt empty. The point was never that everyone should wear the same dress or have the same makeup. The point was that she had built a world with enough internal logic that every detail belonged to her. My role was to listen closely enough to help make that world visible. I’m not interested in reproducing another person’s identity as an aesthetic. I’m interested in finding out what is already there and helping it take form.

EO

Maybe that’s actually the thing I’ve been trying to figure out this whole time. You don’t seem particularly interested in being the makeup artist, or the designer, or the creative director. You seem much more interested in becoming fluent in somebody else’s language. Whether it’s an actor, a musician, or an artist, your role always seems to begin with listening before it begins with making.

ES

I love that. That has always been the most satisfying part of my work in film. The medium changes, the people change, and the projects change, but that feeling never really has. If I can help someone understand their own idea more clearly than when we started, then I feel like I’ve done my job.

EO

If that’s always been the constant, where does it leave you now?

ES

I honestly don’t know, and I think this is the first time in my career I’ve been able to say that. I think I’m gearing up for something, and maybe all of these different parts of my life eventually have to come together. I just haven’t found the next thing I can sink my teeth into yet. But I’m always looking to get bit.