FARGO STAR TRANSFORMED
Calgary makeup artist helped create twins
I think the fans are going to hate me because neither one of them look like Ewan McGregor. GAIL KENNEDY
Gail Kennedy once told Ewan McGregor that she was afraid of him when he was in his Emmit Stussy persona.
Kennedy, the Calgary- based Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, knows better than anyone that it’s McGregor under that curly wig, Spanx-aided posture and posh clothes. As the more successful, thinner, thinner- skinned and better-looking Stussy brother in the third season of Fargo, Emmit is far from the most imposing character to have prowled the frozen Midwest in Noah Hawley’s reimagining of the Coen brothers’ 1996 film. It’s just that he seems so cold compared to brother Ray, the sadsack parole officer also played by McGregor whose life has not been anywhere near as kind.
“I’m reserved on set, I approach him cautiously,” says Kennedy, in an interview at the Calgary Film Centre where much of Fargo’s third season in filmed. “When he is in his Ray persona, it’s all hugs and everything. I don’t know what it is. There’s just something about the Emmit persona. He does the characters so differently that it’s a lot of fun to witness. But there is a difference and we do react even though we know it’s the same person.”
Even before Season 3 of Fargo debuted on FX Canada earlier this month, there was plenty of talk about McGregor’s miraculous transformation into the Stussy brothers. An early promo showed off his Ray Stussy look, which features cowboy boots, moustache and hair that is balding in front and long and straggly out back (and may or may not have been inspired by former pro-wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura’s hairdo, which is balding in front and long and straggly out back.)
The consensus was that McGregor was thoroughly unrecognizable in the role.
In fact, the mission was to make him thoroughly unrecognizable in both roles, it’s just that his Ray persona takes a little more work. Some of that work was presumably enjoyable. Ray has a fairly significant belly, which for most of the third season comes courtesy of padding. But the April 19 season opener required McGregor to emerge naked from a bathtub, which meant the extra heft had to be authentic.
“I had a dinner with him maybe three months before production and I told him to stop working out and start eating ice cream with every meal,” says Hawley. “He said he had been waiting 20 years for a director to tell him that. He went to work beefing up and in the meantime we were designing a look for him with Gail.”
Kennedy, who has been nominated for four Emmy Awards and won in 2007 for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, had meetings with both Hawley and McGregor about the looks.
Since no one wanted to use a bald cap for Ray, the actor agreed to shave his head for the role. This of course meant that he had to wear a wig to play Emmit as well, which lead to the idea of making both Stussys look nothing like Ewan McGregor. Kennedy put together designs using Photoshop, trying different hair styles on pictures of the actor.
“I just started designing looks until we figured out who these guys were and where they came from,” says Kennedy.
To transform McGregor into Ray requires roughly two and a half hours, which includes the time needed to set his wig, and get into the extra padding and costumes. There are silicone prosthetics that need to be applied; one for the nose, one to give him a double-chin and one to fill in what Kennedy calls “that natural little adorable cleft chin.”
Emmit, on the other hand, requires no silicone enhancements. Besides the curly wig, the rest is done cosmetically to give his face a sculpted and “perfect” look. It takes roughly an hour to turn McGregor into Emmit from scratch and 90 minutes to turn him from Ray to Emmit. Either way, it requires a good deal of time in the makeup chair.
“He’s a dream to work with,” Kennedy says. “I couldn’t have asked for a better performer to go through this. Because he’s very easygoing, helpful and fun and he plays music.”
This is actually the third time McGregor has played dual roles in a project. He did it in both 2005’s sci-fi flick The Island and in 2015’s Last Days in the Desert, where he played both Jesus and the Devil.
For the actor, Fargo’s initial attraction was the challenge of playing very different brothers. McGregor says he was contemplating doing another TV series that would have required a five-year commitment when he met an FX producer while skiing.
He told McGregor about the third season of Fargo. It was a show the actor had never seen, largely because he had initially thought making a TV series based on the beloved film was “a really bad idea.”
But he was intrigued and went home to binge-watch Fargo’s first two seasons, which immediately convinced him that Hawley’s vision was genuine and original.
“I get an awful lot of help playing the two different characters,” says McGregor, who calls Kennedy’s makeup designs “brilliant.” “But then, of course, when I got here and got to set I realized they have got to sound slightly different and you have to make them feel like two different people. So it was a lot, early on, to deal with. I really enjoyed that. The challenge of that was great fun.”
The fact that Ray is so popular on set is perhaps a bit of a surprise. After all, Ray’s actions are what sets off at least some of the bloodletting this year. Desperate to raise money and convinced that his older brother tricked him into accepting a Corvette rather than a valuable stamp collection as an inheritance years earlier, Ray is bitter and has a chip on his shoulder and makes some questionable decisions that lead to some typically Fargo-esque, not-nice things happening in Minnesota.
But, it didn’t take long into production for Ewan to learn that everybody loves Ray.
“There’s a real feeling that ‘Ray’s here!’ when I come on as Ray, which is nice,” McGregor says. “Because he is fantastic, Ray. Emmit is less sympathetic but there is something really interesting in that for me to play.”
Whatever the case, the fact that much of the initial buzz about Season 3 revolved around the dual characters and their distinct looks was an early indication for Kennedy and her team that they had accomplished their mission.
“That’s what we wanted,” she said.
“We wanted neither one of them to look like Ewan McGregor. I think the fans are going to hate me because neither one of them look like Ewan McGregor.”
Fargo airs Wednesdays on FX Canada.