ALTHOUGH MARTIN HAD BEEN

“THERE WILL BE OPPOSITION AND YOU HAVE TO PROVE YOU’RE JUST AS QUALIFIED.” STEVIE MARTIN ADVISING BLACK WOMEN ABOUT LEADERSHIP POSITIONS

working in Hollywood for nearly a decade, Respect’s producers initially weren’t sure about hiring her. After an interview, thanks to a referral from veteran hairstylist Davis (Mare of Easttown, The Underground Railroad), who had already been hired as hair department head, she had yet to hear back. “I have a well-rounded résumé, but with this being

Aretha Franklin, an icon, I believe they wanted somebody who had a bit more [notability] than myself,” she says.

But Davis insisted that he wanted Martin, with whom he’d previously worked on several projects, and eventually she got the call to come on board. “I knew they had interviewed other people and there were other choices, so now the pressure was on me to make sure that I did a really good job,” she says.

Martin began building her “well-rounded résumé” at the age of 14, when the Miami native, now

41, started working in a salon as a shampoo girl. After receiving her cosmetology license, she did hair at the salon for a decade before adding part-time and freelance gigs at MAC Cosmetics and CNN to her schedule. “Stevie, you can’t have three jobs,” her mother chided her, so she chose CNN, which allowed her to do both hair and makeup.

CNN’s Atlanta headquarters gave Martin experience working with a variety of hair textures and skin tones under the pressure of live television and breaking news, but after eight years she began looking for ways to move into film and TV. Through persistent networking, she broke through, as a key makeup artist on acclaimed SundanceTV series Rectify.

“I started as a key, and I didn’t even know what that meant. I didn’t know how to read a call sheet,” she says. “I started asking people on set, and every day I had a checklist to learn what I needed. I would go home and google: ‘What does it mean when they say 10-1?’ ” (It’s production lingo for a short bathroom break.)

Martin didn’t want to disappoint those who had referred her, because “when somebody refers you, they put their weight behind you.” Her self-imposed pressure was so great that she turned down her first offer to be a department head, on the 2015 indie Lila & Eve, starring Viola Davis and Jennifer Lopez, because she didn’t feel ready. But the film’s producerdirector, Charles Stone III, believed in her and convinced her to make the leap. “From that, it’s just been referral after referral,” she says.

Nearly a decade after her first Hollywood job, Martin’s attitude and work ethic has remained the same. For Respect, she pored over vintage issues of

Jet and Ebony and researched beauty trends, particularly of the 1950s, a period for which not a lot of reference photographs exist of a pre-fame Franklin, who was back then simply a gifted Detroit church girl. But Martin’s biggest challenge as makeup department head came from staffing enough artists for the big crowd scenes. “I didn’t want to just get anybody, so in numbers terms it looked as though I was understaffed,” she says of her team, which consisted of three in the trailer and about 15 additional artists. “So I would set up a station and help get the background [actors] ready with them.” Making up extras is an atypical move for a department head, but Martin saw Jane Galli on The Nice Guys doing that, “and I was like, that is something I will take with me when I become a department head.”

Another priority of Martin’s is to train artists, knowing that women of color often lack the opportunities to gain valuable credits and working experience in Hollywood. “One thing I always do when I hire my team is teach them to have a certain quality, initiative, integrity and temperament wherever they go,” she says. “When you are in leadership as a Black woman, there will be opposition, and you have to prove you’re just as qualified as anybody else.”

In recent years, the industry has finally begun listening to Black actresses talk about the need to have stylists experienced in working with their hair texture and skin tones. Martin says, “I’ve been on projects where the talent walks in and are so happy to see somebody who looks like them, and then they put [their own] makeup bag away.”

OTHER CREDITS Dear Evan Hansen, P-Valley, Claws

NEXT UP Creed III

Davis