Marvel’s Agatha All Along is a treasure trove of incredible crafts, and every time you watch an episode, you find another element to fall in love with. With every week, we didn’t know what this coven was going to face or what trials they would have to endure. For Makeup Department Head Vasilios Tanis and Hair Department Head Cindy Welles, rejoining Agatha Harkness was spellbinding and well worth the ride.
A character usually knows what to expect when they step up after accepting a challenge, but that’s not true for the witches in Agatha All Along. Once a trial begins, they enter an unknown space and everything around them tranforms: their clothes, makeup, and hair. They have to reorient themselves before they can even take on the task itself. Each fantastical episode could’ve left these characters feeling disconnected from the designs, but it all feels grounded and apart of their identities.
“I think that’s why Vasilios and I work well together,” Welles admits. “We become one mind, in a way, and we absolutely work off of each other. His process doesn’t start until he sees the costumes and then he sees the hair ideas. He will spin off and do his thing, but then we circle back so we can check in with each other. We both truly love thee characters so much, because we feel them and we feel like we know where they are coming from.”
“Both Cindy and I know that Daniel [Selon] has to go first as far as creating the costumes and showing us the looks,” Tanis says. “Sometimes we are involved in the fittings or we will sometimes see photograph for them. We always get to see the concept art as well before they are finished. That gets us motivated to pull our own references and have conversations about where we’d like to see them. We are very fortunate, because we have the complete and utter trust of production as well as the actors being that we worked on WandaVision. We had a lot of freedome, but we also had to understand that our jobs are not only to prepare the actor in their characters but also psychologically transform them into that character mentally. We want them to get out of our chairs to get in front of the camera and become that persona that we all worked on.”
Tanis and Welles help these performers find the characters as each trial begins and ends, but, sometimes, things change in the moment.
“We had that with the music trial in the fourth episode,” Tanis says. “I had something completely different planned for Kathryn’s look, and, as she was in Cindy’s chair, I thought about trying something different. Kathryn was like, ‘What do you mean?’ I started blocking our her eyebrows, and I started with something that I didn’t plan. It suited the character, the trial, the costuming, and the hair much better than what I had designed originally.”
“It’s amazing to watch the character develop in your chair as you are placing a wig on them,” Welles adds. “An actor might be in my chair and then I send them over to Vasilios so he can do his things before coming back to me for the final application. It’s so intertwined and collaborative between us with everything. It’s a click like a switch coming on.”
One of my favorite trials comes in episode four as the coven comes together to perform another cover of ‘The Ballad of the Witches Road.’ Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha has a new swagger with her long tresses, and I am obsessed with Joe Locke’s David Cassidy-inspired locks, but my favorite look of the episode comes with Aubrey Plaza’s Rio. Welles’ hair design has it unique coiffed behind her head, and Tanis’ makeup opens up her face in an entirely new way.
“That hairstyle is inspired by Cher, and I loved how it opened her up and opened up the costume,” Welles says. “If you remember the flower that blossomed in her hand, we used that to apply to her hair. I wanted that to be very ’70s but a bit edgy, but some of the other characters had to have a harder edge than her. The other characters don’t know who she really is yer, so she had to tow a fine line in the entire season.”
“We both discussed her look, and we didn’t want it to be period correct,” Tanis reveals. “We wanted aspects of the ’70s there but we didn’t want it to be considered “a ’70s look,” so we went for a bit more glam. The costume was kind of a tribute to Cher and we wanted her to feel really glamorous and sophistiated in a whimsical way. We focused on beautiful skin and chiseled cheekbones, and I raised her eyebrow a little bit more than she usually does. It opened up her features. Our key makeup artist, Erin LeBre, is a genius with a makeup brush.”
Some audience members might not assume how much work goes into a contemporary trial like in episode three. Every element recalls the sophistication of a Nancy Meyers flick, and the pink hues in the makeup pair well with the brown tones in all the visual designs throughout the episode.
“For the hair, we wanted to show a more elevated class of people–the Hamptons people,” Welles says. “The hair is very polished and very done. They had style, and all of the hair was deliberate in its placement. We used Nancy Meyers as the inspiration, so everything matched with everything being very clean and white. These are people that you would see attending, for instance, a horse show or the kind that you would assume to wear a lot of Ralph Lauren.”
“We wanted to go with a very staunch, upper crust, top drawer look,” Tanis adds. “These characters needed to look rich. Very Republican.”
Is darkness the enemy of a hair and makeup team? Every episode brings us back to the sinister, dark, winding road, and that was a constant challenge for this remarkable duo. It’s a jumping off point before every trial, but the darkness remains an adversary to keep them in check.
“It needed to be dark in order to create that mood and that atmosphere, but we were so conscious of the lighting,” Tanis says. “In finding that balance, it just made everything look a little bit more sinister. Darkness eliminates everything we do in makeup.”
“It is difficult, because, hair-wise, a lot of the actors have darker hair. It becomes a void unless there it a lot of texture there. If you don’t provide that element, you lose the shape.”
Agatha All Along is streaming now on Disney+.
