Tina Kakadelis
Chris Bridges of Gaslight FX is boldly going where few have gone before. After working on Star Trek: Discovery, Bridges was hired to be the department head for special makeup effects on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Chris grew up watching the original series, and it’s special to join the larger Trekkie universe. Ahead of the July 23 Season 4 premiere of Strange New Worlds, Bridges reflects on the legacy of the Star Trek franchise, the difficulty of Spock’s look, and the changes of some of these characters through the years.
I want to start with your childhood and the creature movies that set you on this path. Was there one creature that really inspired you as a kid?
Chris Bridges: I was a big horror movie fan growing up, and John Carpenter’s The Thing did it for me. Oh my gosh, it was legendary. I actually recreated that costume when I was 18 for science fiction conventions, so that was fun. The creatures from that movie really inspired me. I was like, I want to make that.
What’s the next step then? I imagine getting the ability to build these prosthetics…you can’t just go to the local department store and get the ingredients to make it if you have this desire. How did you get to where you were at 18 with the full costume?
I started building masks and monsters when I was probably 14, maybe younger. Yeah, where does one get all these jars of latex, alginate, plaster of Paris, and everything I needed?
When I started doing this, there was no internet. There were Fangoria and Starlog, trade magazines that came out every month that I bought and just pored over. I would see all these great pictures from all these movies I loved. I would be like, okay, I want to build this, I want to build that. I recreated Hellraiser.
We happen to have this little hobby store called John’s Hobby in downtown Calgary. It was a magic/train/model shop and they had latex, crepe hair, grease paint, and all the things I needed to make these monsters. I would be there every week as a kid asking, what’s new?
You’ve been a Star Trek fan since you were growing up. What is it like to get the call that says, hey, we want you to be a part of this thing you’ve loved for decades?
It’s something that I keep pinching myself like, oh, my God, is this actually happening? I’ve been a fan out of the gate, day one. As a kid, I used to go home from elementary school and I used to visit my grandfather, who was my neighbor at the time. I used to go to his house and we’d have a snack and we’d sit and watch classic Trek with Spock and Kirk and all the rest.
That’s where I developed my appreciation and love for Star Trek. Fast forward to 2017 when Star Trek: Discovery comes to Toronto and I manage to get involved in a small way. Because of the sheer volume of aliens, half the makeup and effects crew came from LA because there just weren’t enough people here that were either available or proficient.
I managed to get on and James MacKinnon was the head of department from LA. He had five Emmys from different projects and he’s worked on five different Star Trek series, so he was well-versed in it. On Seasons 2 and 3, I became a key and solidified my role there. Then Strange New Worlds happened and I got in as head of department for that show.
At that point, I’m working with Spock and I’m doing Ethan Peck’s makeup every day. I’m like, oh my God, this was sort of my dream job that I didn’t know I ever wanted or could ever get, but here it is.
My dad is a huge Star Trek fan, so anytime I interview anybody involved in Star Trek, I always go to him and be like, what questions do you have? The idea he threw to me this time was the Klingon design change between Discovery and Strange New Worlds and what facilitated that difference.
That’s a great question and it’s been a hot topic of debate.
It has?
Oh, yeah.
I’m coming as an outsider to Star Trek.
We have to remember that in the ’60s, the Klingons were just weird brows and greasepaint. They had no budget. They needed aliens, but they had to be very simple. The Klingons we saw them evolve into in The Next Generation, with those clean lines, that was from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That’s the first time we really saw the Klingons with the big, ridged brow, the long hair, the bad teeth, and all the armor and whatnot.
In Discovery they redesigned it, and I know a lot of the fans and people I’ve talked to didn’t like it, but it was a creative decision that was made very high up in the food chain. They just felt the need to redesign it for some reason. By the time we got back to Strange New Worlds, it went back to the way it was supposed to be. Give the people what they want, right?
Along those same lines, I imagine that with Strange New Worlds you get a bunch of different aliens for the first time in the Star Trek universe, which must be such a cool experience. What’s the process like?
Specifically for Strange New Worlds, we look at the era when the show takes place. Pike predominantly was the captain at that time. There are only a very select few races that are part of Starfleet. I’m going to nerd out here, but you can’t have all these varied races walking the corridors of the Enterprise because of this established canon.
Where we meet new aliens is when we go down to a new planet. The writers are creating these new species, and it’s all designed in LA by Legacy Effects. We have meetings across the board with producers, costumes, makeup, and hair. Legacy effects will sculpt, design the makeup, and produce the pieces. They send them to me, and then I glue them on the day.
I not only have to satisfy Legacy’s expectations, but all the producers’ expectations, and make sure they’re up to snuff.
I saw that some people are spending three hours in your chair.
Some three hours, some more like five hours.
Wow. What’s the longest build you’ve done?
In Episode 5, we did an alien with the character named Nigel. It was about 4.5 hours in the chair and it was huge. Just covered head to toe in rubber pretty much.
What’s the take-off process? Is that 4.5 hours again or no?
No, that’s maybe half an hour. Maybe 40 minutes. It comes off very fast. People sweat stuff off pretty fast. By the end of the day, it’s almost coming off by itself.
I read another interview that you did, and you were talking about how Spock’s makeup was a huge creative push for you. Why is that?
Spock’s makeup process went through a bit of a change-up from Discovery to Strange New Worlds. If you recall, on Discovery they find Spock in an institution. He’s got a big beard and he’s not quite the Spock we’ve come to know. It’s very early stages of Spock.
There’s no Strange New Worlds at this time, right? We don’t know how many episodes this show will run. Ethan Peck, who plays Spock in both Discovery and Strange New Worlds, was very reluctant to shave his eyebrows. There have only been a handful of Spocks, but Leonard Nimoy used to have his brows shaved, right? Then the hairs were put on one by one.
For Ethan, we put brow blockers on his eyebrows, and that was a process. His makeup was 2.5 hours. It was just ears and these brow blockers. Once his brows were blocked, we put on fake brows. It looked okay for what it was, but for Strange New Worlds we did end up shaving half his brows, just like Leonard Nimoy. We would then take these delicate lace pieces and integrate them seamlessly into his own.
I went from 2.5 hours to about 72 minutes. He was happier in the chair and the makeup looked better. It moved better with the quizzical Spock look.
Some of these characters have been around since the beginning of Star Trek. How much has somebody like Kirk really changed or been able to progress based on not just the prosthetics advancements, but how we were treating hair and makeup then as compared to now?
Everything’s come a long way as far as prosthetics. Back then it was like foam latex. Now it’s all silicone. It moves better, it looks better, all that fun stuff. Makeup, though, I don’t think it’s changed too much. There are better products out there now. Foundations that have moisturizers, all the fun stuff.
Hair products I don’t think have really changed. I could be dead wrong because I don’t really do hair, but it’s the same sort of tools that are being used. What they do is an amazing thing. A hair person who’s worth their salt is fascinating to watch. Makeup artistry itself is really fun. It’s amazing to watch people who can create these characters. It’s great to be part of a bigger team, right?
Another team you worked on was Cross Season 2. Can you talk a little bit about the work you did on that one? It’s a little less obvious than aliens walking around.
We worked on Jeanine Mason’s character in Season 2. We did a giant back tattoo for her, and the tattoos that evolved throughout the season. We made various stages of the tattoos. We didn’t apply them. We gave the finished tattoos over to the makeup artist, and they applied them on the day.
We also worked on a character named Donnie, played by Wes Chatham. He had all these full-arm scars from burns in his character’s past. We made these giant prosthetic pieces to wrap around his arm.
There was also a character named Frankie, played by Giancarlo Vidrio, who had facial scars up into his hairline. It was a different kind of accident, but again, lots of scarring.
Do you feel that because people have their own scars, or they’re around people with scars, that they’re a little more difficult to recreate than something like the otherworldly aliens, where we have no basis for what they should look like?
When you’re making aliens, anything goes. You don’t want to see edges and you want to paint it really nicely of course. As soon as you get into real-life scarring or some sort of casualty, it’s different.
We’ve done a lot of medical series here in Toronto. Saving Hope, Sky Med, which is currently going on. We’ll have a casualty simulation, an open-heart surgery or someone’s scalp is lacerated. Whenever you’re doing stuff like that, you’re trying to get it as real as possible because people have high expectations as opposed to, oh, there’s an alien that’s an alien.
Now it’s like, does that look like a real cut? I find it more challenging and in some ways more rewarding.
My last question for you. As a Star Trek fan, if you were given free range to be able to develop a new alien, what is an attribute or a prosthetic that you would love to build and create for this new species?
I have an answer to this. In the first episode of Strange New Worlds, there was a character called Shepherd. We didn’t get a really good look at him, but he was a character who was put on-screen, beamed in from his own ship. What I loved about the makeup is that it was animatronic from mid-face up. Its eyes were bigger and spread across his head. It was the actor’s mouth for speaking while we puppeteered it.
If I had to design a character, that’s something I would love to do. Introduce an alien that had an animatronic feature, just to kind of remove it from the typical human anatomy. Moving the eyes up and out, maybe two sets of eyes, antennas that move…something interesting like that I would love to do.
