In Wuthering Heights, Hair and Makeup Create the Ultimate Fantasy

Yeah. And I think when you’ve been working a long time—my whole team, we’ve been working a long time in the industry—you’ve got skills, you rely upon what you know can do, and I think just maintaining a sense of calm all around and preparedness, and it’s good to achieve. And Margot is such a brilliant collaborator, and Emerald is incredibly decisive and proactive, so it’s very easy to go, “Yep. No. Yep.” And it just worked.

What did you listen to while you were getting Margot ready?

There was a lot of Kate Bush, and I’m a massive Kate Bush fan. I went to see her in 2014 twice. Very appropriate. Margot’s got a really eclectic range, really broad taste. And we’d put on all sorts. It was good, because you’ve always got to have good tunes.

Wuthering Heights is obviously a very tumultuous story with high highs and low lows. How did you pick and choose when to have big beauty moments and when maybe to pare back for more serious moments?

We broke the story down. Jacqueline Durran, the costume designer, had broken her story arc down into three acts—Wuthering Heights, The Grange, and then that turning point, act three, where suddenly we find that it’s going to be over. Heathcliff realizes that she’s having the baby, and it takes that dark turn. So the three acts really helped us work out when we could be more frivolous and when there could be more dress=up and playfulness, and then when we would turn.

Wuthering Heights, it was more obvious because we’ve got somebody who’s grown up without everything that Isabella has had, by contrast, moving into The Grange. So we knew there was going to be a raw, a natural look to everything. And then I knew when we went to The Grange that we’d have this period of dress-up and experimentation and lots of costumes, lots of hairstyles.

It’s where we start to see what Emerald and I described as the horns, which had come from a very grainy printouts of Scarlett O’Hara, particularly picture of her from 1939 Gone with the Wind where her hair has been twisted into wonderful horns.

Cathy’s complexion has this reflective quality that’s almost sweaty. To your point, we’re in the elements, out in nature, there’s wind whipping in our face. How do you recreate that?

The underlying thing coming from Emerald, her direction is less is more. To go as raw as possible and allow the skin to show through regardless of what products you’re using, because it’s such a plethora to get there. With blush, we did use a lot of cream blush on all the cast, men and women. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, on his skin, there’s wind burn, there’s a ground-in dirt, but all of that was still making him look real. It’s about making them look real, albeit in this sort of fantasy world.