Making of ‘Saturday Night Live’ roundtable panel with Mikey Day and 3 behind-the-scenes artisans
NBC/Universal’s “Saturday Night Live” ended its 49th season in May, a huge number that the cast and crew don’t take lightly. So how do they all keep things fresh and lively after so many decades on the air? That’s one of the questions we pose in Gold Derby’s “Making of ‘Saturday Night Live'” roundtable panel with cast member Mikey Day, wig designer/hair department head Jodi Mancuso, makeup designer/makeup department head Louie Zakarian, and producer/costume designer Tom Broecker, all of whom are eligible at the upcoming 2024 Emmy Awards. Watch the exclusive video interviews above.
Zakarian readily admits that the secret to “SNL” staying relevant is by “keeping up with new technologies and new processes.” He adds, “One of the things we looked into and started doing a lot more of is 3-D printing and 3-D scanning of things. A lot of the makeups this season were sculpted digitally and printed. Especially with the turn-around times we have, it’s really made us be able to produce things really fast and really cleanly.”
Broecker chimes in that the 3-D printers have also been one of the “big changes” utilized by the costume department. This season alone, the devices helped create things like “a set of abs” and “silicone fat pad,” the latter of which was used for Jake Gyllenhaal in the season finale. “It’s such a mind-blowing change for me going forward,” he notes. “Gone are the fat pads of yesteryear which are made out of fabrics. [Zakarian] actually can do in a day-and-a-half or two days a new beautiful silicone fat that we can just zip on to the actor, as opposed to creating some ridiculous Hans & Franz sort of gorilla-style abs.”
Day laughs about how it’s a “mad scientist lab” backstage at “Saturday Night Live” because of all of the new tech tools. “There’s always those 3-D printers working. It looks very futuristic,” he declares. When he started on the cast in 2016, he had to get “plaster all over [his] face” to create a mold, but now there’s a “weird camera” that captures everything as it spins around. “Anything to not sit in that claustrophobic goo is fantastic,” he remarks.
Mancuso explains how the “trickle off” aspect of Zakarian’s 3-D printers even has an effect on the hair department. “We build the wigs, and normally if he was building some kind of hat or headpiece, I probably wouldn’t get that until late Friday. And he can do it quicker for me so that we can do a custom wig fit to it, and it helps me and the shop work quicker.” She declares, “So it’s actually a fantastic tool for all the departments.”
Also in our exclusive video interview, the artisans speak about how long they’ve been working at Studio 8H and what they know now that they wish they would’ve known at the beginning of their tenures. And they take us behind the scenes of some of Season 49’s most memorable sketches, including Ryan Gosling and Day’s instantly iconic “Beavis and Butt-head” moment and the Maya Rudolph musical monologue and “Hot Ones” spoof.
