Updated February 10, 2025 at 13:22 PM ET
Just about every inch of Louie Zakarian's makeup lab is evidence of Saturday Night Live's 50 year legacy of screwball humor.
A bizarre array of prosthetics lines the walls and shelves. There's Kyle Mooney's Baby Yoda, Chris Kattan's Gollum, Will Ferrell's devil, Sarah Sherman's googly eyes, plus bloodied bodies, aliens and scores of bald prosthetics (think Kate McKinnon's parody of Jeff Sessions).
Zakarian figures he's made "tens of thousands of bald caps" in the course of his long career.
In his 30 years with SNL, he's earned 10 Emmys and 10 Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Awards, honors he shares with colleagues.
As head of SNL's makeup department, he and a team of about 18 designers help bring the writers and cast members' wild ideas to life. But they don't transform their faces too much. Zakarian said SNL's creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels wants audiences to still be able to recognize which cast members and big name hosts are underneath the makeup.
Creativity and speed
SNL is a notoriously fast-paced show to work on.
"All of this stuff [wigs, prosthetics, makeup] needs to be built in one to two days," Zakarian said, pointing to the eclectic artifacts in his lab, "On a film this would take weeks." That stuff also needs to be taken on and off lickety-split when performers change between sketches.
Zakarian's week typically begins on Wednesdays, when writers and cast members share rough ideas for sketches and characters that might appear on the show days later.
"You never know what you're going to get," Zakarian said.
He and his team immediately start researching images to help them conceive everything from orcs to breasts to blob fish.
"My Google searches are sometimes not too safe, but it's all for the job," he laughed.
Thanks partly to COVID, Zakarian has found a way to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to build the prosthetics.
In the past, cast members and hosts would need to have their heads and faces covered in a substance containing silicone in order to make molds that would then be used to create the prosthetics.
Today, that process has been replaced with 3D printers, technology Zakarian researched during the pandemic, partly to minimize physical contact between cast and crew. He said the machines have been "a game changer."
"They come in and we do a 3D scan and … their face is right there [on the computer]. No more goop, no more claustrophobic feelings. Takes 5 minutes instead of 30."
The prosthetics are tissue thin, soft and fleshy to the touch. "It just blends into their skin once it's glued on," Zakarian said.
'Just a flurry of hands' during the live show
Each SNL cast member has a "little pit crew" of makeup, hair and wardrobe designers. Hosts are handled — literally — by a slightly bigger crew, since they're in almost every sketch.
During the live show, cast members need to change hair, costumes and makeup in the duration of a commercial break.
When Melissa McCarthy was making cameo appearances as Sean Spicer beginning in 2017, it took Zakarian and his team 10-15 minutes to transform her. But when she hosted the show, and appeared in multiple sketches back-to-back, the costume change had to happen much faster.
Zakarian said McCarthy had to go from "a sketch where she was getting pelted in the face with shaving cream pies" to Sean Spicer's "bald pate, eye bags, eyebrows in 5 minutes."
So what does it look like during those sprints in between sketches?
It's "just a flurry of hands" all over each cast member. Zakarian said he and the designers barely speak, except to say "sorry" a lot, "especially as we're peeling things off [their heads] when there's no time."
Sometimes, Zakarian admitted, there are accidents — like the time one of Bowen Yang's horns fell off his Krampus headdress.
Still, cast members say they're fond of him.
"I just adore him," said former SNL star Kate McKinnon of Zakarian.
She describes working on SNL as "absolutely bonkers" and very much a team effort. She called Zakarian an artist, someone who could help give her characters the looks she wanted. "He just can do it 10,000 times faster than anybody else, and better."
Zakarian almost became a police officer
Zakarian's first professional makeup job was at a community theater in his Queens, N.Y., neighborhood. That's also where he made his first bald cap (for Daddy Warbucks in a production of Annie).
His parents weren't thrilled with the idea of him working in the arts, so Zakarian got a degree in computer science and then studied to become a police officer.
"I took the exams," he said. "I was a couple of weeks away from going into the police academy, and I got a call to work on a TV show."
The show was called Monsters. Later, on The Phil Donahue Show, he helped disguise guests who would only tell their stories on camera incognito. These days, Zakarian also works on other NBC productions including The Kelly Clarkson Show.
It might not be as dangerous as policing the streets but Zakarian says he thrives on the adrenaline rush he gets from working on SNL.
"As soon as that music starts on Saturday night, I get the butterflies," he said. "It's been 30 years now and I still get the butterflies."
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