While the cast and writers of “Saturday Night Live U.K.” are front and center of the British adaptation, the show’s secret sauce is, of course, the artisans. From hand-sewing individual strands of hair onto a David Attenborough wig to tailoring the perfect Melania Trump suit, costume, make up and hair teams are “SNL U.K.’s” unsung heroes.
Kevin Fortune heads up hair and make-up (the team also provide prosthetics when needed), which numbers between 14 to 18 people depending on the day of the week, while Annie Hardinge leads the costume department, which is comprised of around 6 costume assistants.
Their week begins on Tuesday, when they meet the celebrity guest host (which so far has included Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan and Hannah Waddingham among others) and shoot a promo for the coming Saturday’s episode (for the season finale this week “Doctor Who” star Ncuti Gatwa is on hosting duties).
On Wednesday morning they’ll receive around 35 scripts (of which 10 will eventually get the greenlight) followed by a cast read-through to see what’s working. Afterwards the department heads will have a “speed dating” meeting with the writers and producers to discuss make-up, costumes and sets. On Thursday Hardinge is out shopping and hiring costumes while Fortune is directing his team on wigs and by Friday the team are shooting the two pre-recorded sketches, which are broadcast in between the live ones on Saturday
“It is one of the most busiest shows that I’ve done ever, because anyone at any point could come down and say, ‘Kevin, I’ve changed my mind, we want this,’” says Fortune. “And I’ll go, ‘Okay!’ because I don’t want to be one of those people say, ‘Look, it’s Thursday afternoon, are you crazy?’”
Episode 4’s Melania Trump sketch is a case in point. The real Melania gave an impromptu press conference about her ties to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, April 9 and by the following evening the cast and writers had turned around a skit for a Melania-themed cold open and handed it over to Hardinge. That left her just Saturday – show day – to find an appropriate outfit to transform Emma Sidi into the First Lady.
“That suit didn’t exist,” Hardinge reveals. “I managed to find a hire company that opens on a Saturday — I think there’s only one — and I actually found something that had the right feel. We had it altered quite drastically to fit Emma so it had that kind of clinched in look that Melania has.”
While artisans on the U.S. version, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, are a dab hand at the fast-turnaround, it’s the first time the U.K. has seen a show like this on this scale (as Variety first reported, the budget per episode is around $2.6 million). “It’s like you do a brand new live West End Show every week,” says Fortune – plus of course there are the pre-recorded VTs and promos that need to be shot before the broadcast.
“I’ve been doing this job, believe it or not, for 46 years. I have never experienced a show like this, it’s so unique,” says Hardinge.
Occasionally the team get a longer lead time. Episode 2’s “Crab Man” sketch – which saw George Fouracres dressed as a giant crab in a parody of gameshow “The Traitors” – has been one of the most time-consuming and expensive costumes so far, says Hardinge, requiring “weeks and weeks of back and forth, and it ended up being quite expensive.” Complicating matters was the fact that “SNL” have a policy that even the “big make” costumes need to show the actors’ faces.
Made out of latex and resin, Crab Man required weeks of labor as each layer needed to dry before the next one went on. Finally, a visual artist came in to spray it red and put on the finishing touches so it “has the texture and feel of a crab” — even down to the shells and barnacles.
The costume had around four minutes of screentime, while host Riz Ahmed and the “SNL U.K.” cast humorously tried to work out who is the “great big crab man.” Crab Man has since been relegated to a cardboard box in Hardinge’s office. “I don’t know if he’s going to make a resurgence,” she says. “He might pop up in another sketch.”
Unlike crustaceans, parodying real people can be more of a minefield, as the original “SNL” learned last year when Sarah Sherman parodied Aimee Lou Wood by popping in a set of enlarged false teeth and making a gag about fluoride; Wood called the portrayal “mean and unfunny.”
How much of the comedy does Fortune lean into with makeup? “That’s something that I try and think about every single time I create a character,” he says. “Like, ‘What is funny about this?’ Otherwise, we’re just creating a weird caricature, and I don’t want to insult anyone. I want people go, ‘Oh, my God, that’s funny. Oh, that’s so her.’”
One of the biggest constraints is simply the time it takes to get into and out of a costume. “Sometimes you’ve got one minute, 32 seconds,” Fortune reveals. “You may have styled the wig to absolute perfection” but by the time the castmember has jammed it on their heads and run onto the set it’s not looking quite as pristine, as in the case of Jack Shep’s Princess Diana get-up in the show’s inaugural episode, which gave the royal’s traditional textured pixie-cut a more mussed-up look than she may have worn in real life (albeit one that added to the wackiness).
In the same sketch Annabel Marlow was dressed as Queen Elizabeth I in a hired period gown, which Hardinge almost entirely restructured in the back to make it easier to slip on and off. “We have to take all the hooks and eyes off [the back],” she says. “We have to velcro all the fastenings.”
The wigs are equally labor-intensive. “To make a really good wig, you need about eight weeks, and it usually cost around £8,000 ($10,650),” says Fortune. “We don’t have that time. We have three or four days. But whatever we do, we have to make it look as realistic as possible within a tiny amount of time. It’s not so much the budget, it’s the time we have.”
Surprisingly the most expensive hairpiece so far has been Attenborough’s, which Fortune reveals was a hybrid of a cheap £20 ($26) wig at the back combined with tens of man-hours knotting individual strands of hair onto a lace front to create the centenarian’s familiar pate. “There’s a lot of work that goes into something to make it look like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s his hair,’” says Fortune. Fortunately the wig has had a second outing with Fouracres donning it again in Episode 7, when his parody Attenborough turned up to wrestle a discontented rhino during Weekend Update.
With Season 2 on the horizon, no doubt the cast and artisans have plenty more surprises in store – including, hopefully, the return of Crab Man.
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