Mary Queen of Scots Hair and Makeup Interview

You Won't Believe What Went Into Margot Robbie's Wild Transformation Into Queen Elizabeth

Dec 22 2018 by Kelsey Castañon

Four hundred or so years before Meghan Markle had the power to send sheer tights sales through the roof, it was Queen Elizabeth I who set the fashion and beauty trends. Everything from her hair to her eyebrows was carefully calculated, extravagant, and laced with cover-up — and Margot Robbie's mind-blowing transformation into the character takes centre stage in Josie Rourke's new historical epic, Mary, Queen of Scots.

"When you're working with a modern actress who's got thick, beautifully shaped eyebrows, we've got to try and get rid of that."

Bringing a centuries-old look to fruition in 2018, though, was no easy feat. "In the Elizabethan period, women plucked away their eyebrows and the front of their hairlines because it was beautiful to have a high forehead and almost no eyebrows," the film's head of hair and makeup Jenny Shircore told POPSUGAR. "Elizabeth already had a high forehead, and she dictated fashion and beauty through how she looked. Of course, her features were very, very different from Margot's, and that was a bit of a challenge. When you're working with a modern actress who's got thick, beautifully shaped eyebrows, we've got to try and get rid of that in order to achieve the feel of the period.

Factor in the amount of hair dye needed for Queen Mary I (played by Saoirse Ronan)'s eyebrows, how Shircore researched without the internet, and the makeup it took to recreate Queen Elizabeth I's disfiguiring illness and you've got a production that was bound from the start to be a royal pain in the ass — and pretty damn powerful, too.

Image Source: Liam Daniel / Focus Features

The Biggest Challenge Doing the Makeup For Mary, Queen of Scots

As you might imagine, working on a film set in the 1500s — when there aren't many photo references available online — you have to get creative in your research. . . and do a little travelling to museums for inspiration. "You have to study portraits and go to art galleries to see them for real," Shircore said. "You go to art galleries or the old grand houses all over the place here in the UK. There you can see that the women were painted with white faces and rouged cheeks."

Then, of course, came actually recreating the looks, of which you must maintain the period. "That was the biggest challenge — not letting it become modern," she said. "For example, you could be so tempted to use eyeliner and mascara because we're so used to that pretty definition, but you have to resist that because otherwise you just don't get the period feel. You've got to resist putting that red lipstick on. You couldn't use what they used back then because it was full of lead and mercury, but you can crush up pigment to make a blusher, and use soft grease for eyebrows."

Image Source: Everett Collection

How She Recreated Queen Elizabeth I's Smallpox

"With anything you are working with Queen Elizabeth I, you have to hold in your mind's eye the iconic portrait of the white face and the red wig."

"With anything you are working with Queen Elizabeth I, you have to hold in your mind's eye the iconic portrait of the white face and the red wig," Shircore said. "I had this vehicle of smallpox to use to help me get to that iconic portrait, and so I put a few lightweight, pre-molded skin blisters and boils in areas where I wanted to change her features. I wanted to reduce Margot's beautiful bottom lip to get it closer to Elizabeth's thinner lip, so I put the blisters and the boils along her bottom lip because, like any woman, once the boils have gone and you are scarred, you would cover that scar with makeup. I also did that with her eyebrows and her nose because in a way, the scarring from the boils and the blisters thinned down her eyebrows and the bridge of her nose."

Image Source: Liam Daniel / Focus Features

A Note on the Eyebrows in Mary, Queen of Scots

Eyebrows were wildly important during the Elizabethan period, which is why Shircore paid special attention to this feature on all the actors. "We obviously bleached out Margot's eyebrows to give her a softer eyebrow to go with her red hair, but we left them quite full at first because that was the young Elizabeth and we were gradually changing her. So once we've got the boils, and the blisters, and the scarring, we then made them up into those eyebrows, her lovely full eyebrows, and started to reduce them by using various waxes to cover bits of hair so it would look like her eyebrows were slightly straggly and thinner. That straggly eyebrow look went well with the dry, brittle, thinning wig because she started to lose her hair after smallpox."

She also paid close attention to the brows of Ronan's character, Mary Stuart. "With Saoirse, we plucked a little bit of her eyebrows, and we bleached her eyebrows as well. She was more pragmatic [with her look], but we did that because a lot of the fashions that developed in that time period were followed by what the kings and queens did."

Turns out, there are some things never change.

Image Source: Everett Collection

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