Our Principal Christine Blundell Talks About Designing Hair & Makeup for ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”🪲
Our Principal’s and Oscar & BAFTA winning Hair & Makeup Designer’s, Christine Blundell’s latest film ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ was released in UK cinemas on the 6th of September this year and it continues to beat box office records in its first month.
The sequel of Tim Burton’s 1988 classic was eagerly awaited by fans all over the world , as it has been over 30 years in the making.
This sequel is set more or less in the present day – although time in Burton’s world is elastic – with the now adult Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) rocking exactly the same haunted Victorian doll wardrobe and Bauhaus-groupie haircut as her teenage self in the first film. Lydia has achieved a degree of celebrity as a TV personality: she’s a “psychic mediator” and the host of a real-life hauntings show titled Ghost House. But she’s a shadow of her spiky former self.
A family tragedy brings everyone back to the house where it all started, offering an opportunity for the persistent Beetlejuice to inveigle his way out of the underworld and finally claim Lydia as his reluctant spouse. There’s a spurious subplot involving Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s spurned (and dissected) ex-wife, who has pulled herself back together (literally) and has set her sights on reclaiming her man. And a fun new addition to the cast is Willem Dafoe, playing a deceased actor who in turn is playing a hard-boiled cop tasked with investigating rule violations in the world of the dead; the gleeful silliness of scenes such as these are where the film feels most alive.
A great number of our Academy tutors and graduates worked with Christine on this film and enjoyed it immensely. You can read about some of the ‘Behind the Scenes’ moments Christine talked about in her recent interviews, for US Weekly, Los Angeles Times and Allure magazines.
Here is a short summary of what Christine said in her interviews – feel free to click on above links for original magazines’ articles, to read the full versions of the interviews.
“My job really was to prep everything so I had every version of what we could do with Lydia’s character further down the line and once Winona started, we played about a few different looks and kind of worked out that we had to give a nod to that fringe. I think I’d have been literally blasted by the fans if she didn’t still have an essence of grown-up goth about her. So we definitely decided to sort of stay in that area.”
For me, it was important for my department to be “respectful” to the original 1988 cult classic while also finding their “own” style more than 30 years later. Each decision was a “collaboration” between myself, the actors and director Tim Burton, who was “very specific” about what he envisioned for the characters.
That included Michael Keaton’s titular character, a ghost who had to look ageless, despite the decades between movies. And although Beetlejuice’s overall appearance stayed fairly similar to the original, my team and I still went through “weeks” of trying “different samples of how [his look] should be.”
Here is one BTS episode of how the make up team resolved the problem of the actor’s tongue still showing an un-ghostly shade of pink.
Christine Blundell and her hair and makeup team quickly got a blue food dye concoction for the actor to gargle and spit out so his tongue would go dark. It’s an example of the type of practical effects Burton leaned on for the 36-year sequel to his cult classic “Beetlejuice” — itself known for doing real illusions in front of the camera.
Our Principal worked on 2 more films since working on ‘Beetlejuice’ sequel and she took many of our graduates as her trainee makeup artists and also more recent graduates who did their work experience on those films.
She averages 2 or 3 films a year still, while actively supervising the teaching at the Academy and sometimes teaching here herself, usually during our final 4 Month Film & TV Hair , Makeup & SFX course week, that we call Bootcamp week, in which our students have their exams, pulling together all the skills they learnt while doing the course. Click here to find out more about the course and its syllabus.