Tina Kakadelis
When it comes to hair and makeup, there are few as obsessed with curating an image than the Instagram Influencer. Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar takes its audience back to a simpler time; the 2010s. Also known as the dawn of the Instagram Influencer. One influencer rose above the rest, Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever), but her rise to fame was filled with lies and scandals. She shifted her persona to win over every move and it was hair and makeup designer Helen Magelaki’s job to make sure the world of Belle Gibson was styled to perfection.
After Apple Cider Vinegar’s release on Netflix, Helen Magelaki sat down with TV Obsessive’s Tina Kakadelis to discuss the subtle changes of Belle Gibson, the challenges of a $49 bald cap, and the perfecting the art of the Influencer look.
TV Obsessive: Before I start with questions, I just have to say Please Like Me is one of my favorite shows, and I was thrilled to see that you worked on it for a long time.
Helen Magelaki: Oh, really? Yeah, I love that show. We did that, what, ten years ago now. I still keep in contact with Josh [Thomas], such a sweet human being. They did a show like Please Like Me in the States, but it doesn’t work. It’s the Australian humor that makes it.
So how did you get into a career in hair and makeup? Did you love makeup as a kid?
Oh, I would have been about seven, eight years old when I saw the original Planet of the Apes. I was extremely fascinated because I was a kid watching television and seeing monkeys, but monkey faces on humans. I was like, wow, how did they do that? I knew from a very early age that’s what I wanted to do.
You hear Planet of the Apes as being so many people’s entry point into film, but I’ve never heard it in terms of makeup. That’s great! And then how did you get involved with Apple Cider Vinegar?
I remember I was in Queensland and I got an email asking me if I would be interested in this show, and it was probably about eight months prior. Straight away it’s like, oh, my God, how can you say yes to something that’s eight months away? (laughs)
One of the producers at Seesaw Productions sent me one or two very early draft scripts, and I thought, oh, yeah, this seems like a really nice show.
I like how you say it’s nice, when the main character is distinctly not nice.
The thing is, with Apple Cider Vinegar, as we got into production, the director, Jeffrey Walker, who’s absolutely brilliant, and Samantha Strauss, who was our showrunner, they wanted to recreate stuff in Belle’s life, but they didn’t want to depict the characters to a tee.
It was just doing very subtle things. I wasn’t trying to make Kaitlyn look like Belle Gibson. I would enhance the real look, like give her the ponytail that Belle Gibson always wore in real life.
When Belle first started, she was just a normal person, and then she got into this Instagram stuff. We did little things to show that change. Like, I had fake teeth made for Kaitlyn. In real life, you see Belle Gibson when she was younger, her teeth weren’t great. She had a big gap in the middle of the front teeth. Then, when she started becoming more public and more insta famous, as they say, we used Kaitlyn’s own teeth.
We weren’t trying to wholly recreate the Belle character. I don’t know if you get it in America, but here in Australia, one of the networks jumped on to the story for their own show. They interviewed the real people and there were no similarities between our cast and the real-life people.
It’s interesting too, because Belle is very much a chameleon of a character. Whenever she meets someone new, it feels like she changes her whole persona. What is that like as the hair and makeup person? How did you map those changes throughout the whole season?
When you read the script, depending on what’s happening in the storyline you go, okay, when she’s cooking, let’s put her hair up. And when she had that big book launch and the award night, we glamorized her up. In real life, if you look at photos of Belle Gibson, she had changed a lot.
She grew up in Queensland and she was quite a bit of, just a normal kid, I suppose, rebelling. She had the black hair, that punky, edgy sort of look. That version of Belle was played by Sunny Darcy-Smith and we shaved the side of her head.
It really depended on the storyline. You’d go, okay, this would be good with her hair down, this would be good with her hair up. Kaitlyn had a lot of say in how she wanted to look, and it was really good to collaborate with Kaitlyn as well.
One of the hallmarks of the Instagram influencer is makeup that’s supposed to look like there is no makeup. My understanding is that, on camera, the makeup has to be heavier. What does that look like in terms of creating that style?
You know, I think Kim Kardashian sort of started that with all the shading and the contouring, that phase. It was like, oh, my God, this is what I used to do for the opera makeup in the early ’90s. (laughs)
With HD, you have to tone down the makeup quite a bit. You can’t really see it on screen unless you want it to look like someone has makeup on. For Kaitlyn, her makeup was really tiny, but I gave her lots of mascara, so when she cried and had all those emotional trauma times, Jeffrey really wanted to see the black around her eyes. There was one particular scene when she goes to the hospital and is lying in the MRI machine, the eyes are really black. They wanted me to really go full on with that.
When it comes to actual everyday makeup, the beauty makeup, on HD, you have to be careful how much makeup you do put on because it can be quite noticeable.
Instagram has changed massively in between Apple Cider Vinegar and today. What did that research look like for you?
I didn’t have to really do much research because I was, and still am, working very heavily in the industry. I’ve been doing it for 30+ years. I very clearly remembered 15 years ago. It wasn’t that long ago for me to forget exactly what I was doing. Everyone used Mac back then, so I would use similar colors to that time.
I remember very clearly what I was doing because as a makeup artist, you have a style. As the years go by, you might develop that style and enhance and change it. But 15 years ago, for me, wasn’t that long to forget what I was doing then.
Even before that, I had done a movie called Better Man, and that was set in the ’90s in England. I lived the ’90s, so I sort of had an idea of what the look was. Especially as a hairdresser and as a makeup artist, you have an idea and you remember the looks of those times you lived through.
On the opposite end of the wellness spectrum in the show, you have the Lucy character who actually does have cancer. Can you talk a little bit about creating that makeup look?
For me as a makeup artist, to have the opportunity to create that look for somebody is quite challenging and difficult, especially when you’re doing a show where you don’t have the money to have that person get a head cast to make a really beautiful silicone bald cap.
So I had to buy these off-the-shelf bald caps. Having done bald caps for a long time, I sort of developed a technique, my own technique. I thought it had to look very realistic, because if it doesn’t, it’s just going to look silly and quite embarrassing.
I developed this technique where it would take doing the prep underneath the ball cap to make it flawless. Prepping and getting that hair as flat as possible underneath the bald cap and doing all these other things before we put a $49 piece of plastic on her head.
I said to production, this is going to take quite a while. Every time we had to do the bald cap, it would take us 2.5 hours. Two of us for 2.5 hours. The underneath work was probably the hardest to make sure that everything looked really smooth. Then getting the bald cap on, gluing it, getting rid of all the edges, and doing a painting technique so it does look realistic. For a $49 bald cap, I think we did a pretty good job.
Then different stages of different wigs made for different looks. There’s a blue wig and a red wig. Those were just wigs that I had in my stock. The blue one was originally a blond wig that we colored. Then the last look at the end of Episode 6 was really short hair. I had that wig made in the UK. That it was a beautiful hairpiece, that one.
Is the bald cap the longest you’ve ever had to do or have you done longer?
I worked on a movie last year and I can’t talk about it very much because the movie’s not out yet. But I remember there was one look in there that took like seven hours. That’s full-on prosthetics.
I feel like a lot of people who don’t wear makeup, me being one of them, we don’t understand. I bought my first concealer three months ago, and that was huge for me.
Congratulations!
(laughs) Thank you. But I think that I, and a lot of other people who watch movies, don’t understand the time it takes for just one look. What is the time of Kaitlyn coming and sitting in the chair for just a regular Belle look?
For a regular Belle look, we would get that done in an hour. Her hair and makeup in an hour.
That’s much longer than I would have ever thought!
We have to make sure that the makeup that we do doesn’t look like the actors have makeup on. How you put the mascara on matters and how you put on the lipstick matters. Everything matters.
