Tina Kakadelis
On March 6, 2025 the full first season of Deli Boys premiered on Hulu. The series centers on two brothers, Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh), in the immediate aftermath of the death of their father. Mir and Raj’s mourning is cut short when they learn the true extent of their father’s business and his widespread drug empire. Now, the party boy Raj and goody two-shoes Mir, have to team up to make sure their father’s legacy lives on.
Behind the scenes, it’s makeup department head Nesrin Ismail’s job to design the gorgeous, ’80s-inspired looks for the characters of Deli Boys. After the series premiere, Ismail sat down with TV Obsessive’s Tina Kakadelis to discuss her gory makeup roots, the inspiration for Deli Boys, and how essential her department is in the grand scheme of storytelling. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
TV Obsessive: I want to start by asking how you began your career in makeup and when special effects came into that.
Nesrin Ismail: I actually came to America to go to makeup and special effects school. I really wanted to work. I ended up mostly working on TV. A lot of films, too, mostly indies.
Was there a movie or TV show you saw as a kid that was the lightning bolt of, I want to do makeup?
I was mostly interested in storytelling. I loved movies and the visual art of it. I started wanting to maybe be a director, but then, it’s too hard. I was good at visually expressing things, whether it be drawing or whatever. I kind of became interested in makeup and how visuals are represented on a camera or on a screen.
You’ve worked on Walking Dead and Chicago PD. Both of those are gnarly. What was your role on those shows?
In The Walking Dead, we had two departments. There was the regular makeup department, which takes care of all the main actors. We can do bruises, scratches, all that. Then they had the full effects department that was separate. Those are the guys who did all the zombies and the extreme blood. They were the best of the best, I’ll tell you that much. I never really thought I would do as much effects work as I ended up doing in life, in my career. Before The Walking Dead, I did basic effects. Bruising, cuts, all that. After The Walking Dead, I started getting more interested in special effects.
How did you get involved with Deli Boys? What made you interested in being part of this particular story?
Deli Boys is so different. I knew somebody who was the show’s Unit Production Manager (UPM). It’s the same UPM I worked with years before, so he knew my work. He just submitted me and I applied like everybody else.
I got approved and we did the pilot. As you know, pilots, even if you have a great feeling about them, you really never know. Then, when we got picked up, it was phenomenal.
Part of the inspiration for the makeup came from the cultures of Pakistan, the Middle East, and South Asia. What kind of research goes into that? How are you spotlighting those cultures through makeup?
The writing of the show is very colorful. All the characters are incredibly colorful. Everything looks so rich. I wanted to have intense richness in the looks, but I wanted all of the looks to be completely different from each other. All the women, they’re all completely glammed up, but they’re so different from each other.
What I wanted to highlight is the diversity. For every character, I have to take a look at the character arc, their background. What era did they grow up in? The era you grew up in truly affects the way you look at beauty, the way you look at glam, the way you look at yourself.
One of our main characters, Lucky, played by the amazing Poorna [Jagannathan], she grew up as a poor, poor kid. She grew up watching ’80s Bollywood movies. When she grew up, she got her own career and her own money, and she goes back to the opulence she saw as a child. My inspiration for her character was ’80s Bollywood stars. Rekha was one of the biggest Bollywood stars of the era. I couldn’t do a full ’80s makeup look, but it was ’80s inspired. It’s a contemporary look rooted in the history of each character.
As somebody who’s not a makeup person and who doesn’t really understand it, it’s so interesting to hear this. You’re right, everything is shaped by what you grew up with. I hadn’t thought about it in a makeup sense, but it’s fascinating. I also saw that you want to be collaborative with the actors who are playing these roles. How much are you pre-planning before you meet the actors on day one? How much is it changed by these conversations you’re having with them?
In general, you get the script and you do your own breakdown. Then you have a meeting with the creators and the producers about the general look. From there, I do my own research. I get my mood boards together. I have a few ideas of what I want to do, and then the last thing is you talk with the actor. At the end of the day, people might not agree with me on that, but I feel that any actor playing any character, no matter how far it is from who they actually are, they bring a piece of themself to that character. Without that, it’s never going to be believable. An actor has to be comfortable…not comfortable with the makeup per se, but comfortable with that piece of themself and how it’s represented on their face.
You have a conversation with the actor about your ideas, and then what they think the character should be, should look like. Maybe you can’t discuss the color scheme because you also have to coordinate with the wardrobe department. Hair, makeup, and wardrobe, they’re three separate departments, but I’m a big believer that they all have to pull in one cohesive look.
You can’t be in one direction while wardrobe is in a completely different direction and hair is also different. It’s a collaboration. You take the original idea and it grows and grows until it becomes something completely different.
It’s more apparent with the Prairie character, played by Alfie Fuller. Yeah. Because the initial idea of her was kind of Solange-ish. When I read the script, I put Solange on my moodboard. Then I met Alfie and she likes makeup. Not a whole lot, but some of her daily makeup I thought was really great, so we incorporated it into Prairie.
There’s one scene, I’m not sure which episode, where she has those white dots around her eyes. At that time, that was a year-and-a-half ago mind you, Alfie was really into those dots. She put it in her real life and I was like, this is great, we should use this.
You get the idea of the actor and the actual character, talk it out with the producers and the directors. Then you talk it up with the actor and then you adapt it. It’s really a little bit of a salad.
Filmmaking in general, it’s really not one person. It’s truly a collaborative medium. From the smallest person to the biggest one. It’s a whole vision. A whole Tetris thing you put together as a team.
That’s the best part about filmmaking as art, I love that. Deli Boys had a female leadership team, which allowed the makeup department more time, because there was a better understanding of how much this process takes. Can you talk a little bit about that?
There is no time in film (laughs). There was more of an understanding, though. Especially in the technical part. We shoot out of sequence, right? You have to finish a certain number of scenes in a day. That is non-negotiable unless somebody dies. You can go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between scenes throughout the day changing everything.
Let’s say we’re shooting three days in the show, right? Three TV show days in one actual day. Each has a different look. You can do day one and then you go change the makeup, do day two. Then they decide they want to keep that camera set up because it’s gonna be a little bit quicker to do day one and day two with that same set-up.
That means you’re changing the makeup four times. That’s what happens. That’s actually a normal occurrence. The looks are so different that the time they want to save by changing the makeup four times…changing that makeup is going to take more time than actually changing the camera. Which is more beneficial?
We were in love with our executive producer and showrunner, Michelle Nader, and Jenni Konner, our executive producer, because you can go to them in a meeting and say, that means we’re going to change the makeup four times back and forth and it’s not a ten-minute thing. It’s not a lipstick that you take on and take off. Because they are women and know how much time everything takes, they’re like, yeah, maybe it’s not worth it, maybe we’ll just do the two days and then we’ll shoot that.
It was a little bit more understanding because in general, it’s like, hurry up, let’s do it in ten minutes. I’m like, that’s a 45-minute makeup look.
Is there a common misconception about makeup that you feel viewers or directors have who don’t have experience in makeup?
Usually directors, or at least the directors I’ve worked with, have a good idea about what’s going on. What people don’t know is in film and TV, makeup is different from real life. I don’t think an actress, in real life, would go out to dinner with her husband with that makeup. That’s a lot of makeup. It’s a character-driven look that’s enhanced with the fur coats, the hair, and all that.
Makeup for TV is truly not about being beautiful. Of course everybody wants to be beautiful. No person wants to go on a screen not feeling beautiful. Not even us. You get tagged in a photo on Instagram that’s not a great picture and you’re gonna feel some kind of way. Everybody wants to look great in front of the camera, but the main thing is that you have to serve the character.
It’s about the actual character that’s written. It’s not about your personal taste. Your personal taste shapes the look a little bit, but it’s really about serving the character. How does he feel? How does she feel? How does she want to be perceived?
With the Prairie character, if you look at every episode, her makeup looks were vastly different. It wasn’t different colors. It was just vastly different makeup. What does that tell you? It tells you that she’s putting on a mask. That’s not the real her. She’s putting on a costume. She’s putting on a mask because the character is of somebody who’s somewhat of a fraud. Makeup enhances that.
Thank you so much, Nesrin. This was fascinating. Every day I’m learning more about makeup and it’s so great.
Thank you for having me!
