The Favourite's hair and make-up artist talks wigs, badger make-up and bending the rules

Olivia Coleman in The Favourite

At first glance, the Oscar-nominated The Favourite appears to perfectly represent the period in which it is set, from the lavish interiors of Hatfield House to the dramatic silhouettes of Sandy Powell’s costumes and the powdered wigs of the politicians. But the closer you look, the more everything seems a little, well, off. After all, it wouldn’t be a Yorgos Lanthimos film if things appeared exactly as they should.

“For my first meeting with Yorgos, I’d done all this research. And so I sort of regurgitated the information, about what the look of the period was, and he said, ‘well we don’t know, we weren’t there’. So there was free rein, really,” said Nadia Stacey, who was responsible for all of the make-up, hair - and, crucially, wigs - you see in the film. “I sort of feel as though you need to know the rules to break them. So the silhouettes tended to be true to the period, but we played around with the colours: some wigs were sprayed with pastel chalks, and others we put bows in, when there wouldn’t have been bows. Everything had a bit of a quirky twist.”

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