Viewers of the Emmy-nominated Angelyne on the Peacock might be surprised to learn how little of star Emmy Rossum they actually saw. Rossum said during a panel appearance at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees event that 10 prosthetic pieces transformed her face and body into Los Angeles billboard queen Angelyne.
“None of me is me,” Rossum said. “There are two contact lenses in each eye. There is a chest piece that wraps around the neck and hairline. Even earlobes, hands – everything is unrecognizable [as myself].”
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Emmy-nominated makeup department manager Kate Biscoe said the prosthetic created a unique paradox. Biscoe is usually tasked with making prosthetic material look like human skin. However, Angelyne has changed her body herself with plastic surgery.
“It’s all very meta because she’s put inorganic material into herself to put this other identity and reinvent herself as something else,” Biscoe said of the real Angelyne. “It was such a tightrope and such a balancing act to try to make something that’s inorganic look like skin, but also portray that it’s inorganic in some aspect, without losing the identity of that version of the person that we’re trying to get the viewer to empathize.”
Rossum also plays Angelyne before she undergoes her first surgery. Even then, Biscoe’s team changed her appearance.
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“There’s not a single look where I’m not wearing a prosthetic of some kind,” Rossum said. “Whether it’s just a nose and sometimes PVC tubing in my nose, I think it’s a catheter ring to change the shape of my nose from the inside out.”
Prosthetic designer Vincent Van Dyke said he hopes his Emmy-nominated work is imperceptible to audiences.
“At the end of the day, the biggest goal here is not to distract,” he said. “To make it feel like it’s seamlessly blending into this world.”
Van Dyke and Biscoe added that giving older makeup to co-stars, including Michael Angarano, helped illustrate how different Angelyne’s look is. Both actors appear as 70-year-olds, and make-up artist David Williams was responsible for the supporting cast.
Rossum said she wore more than 100 different costumes as Angelyne. Costume designer Danny Glcker found the same fabric Angelyne wore and oversaw the custom design of Rossum’s costumes.
“I was able to really work with her over many decades to track not just the styles of the day and the kinds of specific trends that Angelyne herself followed,” Glicker said. “But also this development of herself as the embodiment of a very specific hot-pink sparkly, magical, fluffy truth.”
Rossum met with the real Angelyne and paid her lifetime rights to support her contribution to culture.
“She has a real Tinkerbell energy — at the same time, she moves incredibly fast and also seems to float and float in the air,” Rossum said.
Come back Monday for the panel video.