Mary Queen of Scots Hair and Makeup Interview
The Team Behind Margot Robbie's Mind-Blowing Transformation Into Queen Elizabeth Spills the Tea
As POPSUGAR editors, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. If you buy a product we have recommended, we may receive affiliate commission, which in turn supports our work.
Four-hundred-something years before Meghan Markle had the power to send sheer pantyhose sales through the roof, it was Queen Elizabeth I who set the fashion and beauty trends. Everything from her hair to her eyebrows was carefully calculated, extravagant, and laced with cover-up — and Margot Robbie's mind-blowing transformation into the character takes center stage in Josie Rourke's new historical epic, Mary, Queen of Scots.
"When you're working with a modern actress who's got thick, beautifully shaped eyebrows, we've got to try and get rid of that."
Bringing a centuries-old look to fruition in 2018, though, was no easy feat. "In the Elizabethan period, women plucked away their eyebrows and the front of their hairlines because it was beautiful to have a high forehead and almost no eyebrows," the film's head of hair and makeup, Jenny Shircore, told POPSUGAR. "Elizabeth already had a high forehead, and she dictated fashion and beauty through how she looked. Of course, her features were very, very different from Margot's, and that was a bit of a challenge. When you're working with a modern actress who's got thick, beautifully shaped eyebrows, we've got to try and get rid of that in order to achieve the feel of the period."
Factor in the amount of hair dye needed for Queen Mary I (played by Saoirse Ronan)'s eyebrows, how Shircore researched without the internet, and the makeup it took to re-create Queen Elizabeth I's disfiguring illness, and you've got a production that was bound from the start to be a royal pain in the ass — and pretty damn powerful, too.
The Biggest Challenge Doing the Makeup For Mary, Queen of Scots
As you might imagine, working on a film set in the 1500s — when there aren't many photo references available online — you have to get creative in your research . . . and do a little traveling to museums for inspiration. "You have to study portraits and go to art galleries to see them for real," Shircore said. "You go to art galleries or the old grand houses all over the place here in the UK. There you can see that the women were painted with white faces and rouged cheeks."
Then, of course, came actually re-creating the looks, of which you must maintain the period. "That was the biggest challenge — not letting it become modern," she said. "For example, you could be so tempted to use eyeliner and mascara because we're so used to that pretty definition, but you have to resist that because otherwise you just don't get the period feel. You've got to resist putting that red lipstick on. You couldn't use what they used back then because it was full of lead and mercury, but you can crush up pigment to make a blusher, and use soft grease for eyebrows."
The 1 Product She Used Most During the Film
"We used a variety of products depending on the day, actor's skin, and occasion, but it was mostly MAC products because they've got such a wonderful range. The one we used on set a lot, even for the men, was the MAC Blot Powder ($25, originally $29)."
How She Re-Created Queen Elizabeth I's Smallpox
"With anything you are working with Queen Elizabeth I, you have to hold in your mind's eye the iconic portrait of the white face and the red wig."
"With anything you are working with Queen Elizabeth I, you have to hold in your mind's eye the iconic portrait of the white face and the red wig," Shircore said. "I had this vehicle of smallpox to use to help me get to that iconic portrait, and so I put a few lightweight, premolded skin blisters and boils in areas where I wanted to change her features. I wanted to reduce Margot's beautiful bottom lip to get it closer to Elizabeth's thinner lip, so I put the blisters and the boils along her bottom lip because, like any woman, once the boils have gone and you are scarred, you would cover that scar with makeup. I also did that with her eyebrows and her nose because in a way, the scarring from the boils and the blisters thinned down her eyebrows and the bridge of her nose."
The Hair Styler That Works Wonders For Period Films
"There was a hair cream on set that we all used called Vitapointe Creme Hairdress & Conditioner ($34)," Shircore said. "It works like magic for period films. It can be used very lightly or used heavily to achieve a really greasy effect. Otherwise, we used a lot of various serums because we did a lot of those sculptural looks with the hair, and that helped us create various clear, clean shapes."
How She Kept the Makeup From Budging
"With makeup, we always finished with a heavy duty white setting powder (like the MAC Cosmetics Prep + Prime Transparent Finishing Powder ($29)) on top of a heavier foundation."
A Note on the Eyebrows in Mary, Queen of Scots
Eyebrows were wildly important during the Elizabethan period, which is why Shircore paid special attention to this feature on all the actors. "We obviously bleached out Margot's eyebrows to give her a softer eyebrow to go with her red hair, but we left them quite full at first because that was the young Elizabeth and we were gradually changing her. So once we've got the boils, and the blisters, and the scarring, we then made them up into those eyebrows, her lovely full eyebrows, and started to reduce them by using various waxes to cover bits of hair so it would look like her eyebrows were slightly straggly and thinner. That straggly eyebrow look went well with the dry, brittle, thinning wig because she started to lose her hair after smallpox."
She also paid close attention to the brows of Ronan's character, Mary Stuart. "With Saoirse, we plucked a little bit of her eyebrows, and we bleached her eyebrows as well. She was more pragmatic [with her look], but we did that because a lot of the fashions that developed in that time period were followed by what the kings and queens did."
Turns out, there are some things that never change.
