#make-up

Due to popular demand uwu... A jester!

I absolutely love DS9, thank you so much for both your work on the show and your willingness to answer questions about it!

One thing I'm curious about every time I watch DS9 in particular is the number of actors with heavy prosthetics but relatively little screentime/lines/etc. (both background and main cast).

I was wondering if knowledge of how long a particular actor would have to be in makeup for a relatively short scene ever made you do a rewrite/impacted your writing in any way?

Honestly, and I'm not proud of this, we didn't really think about it. We had the Westmores to handle that stuff, and they're the best, so we just trusted them to design make-up that wouldn't be too hard on the actors. But that meant there were still days where Armin or Rene or Michael got into full make-up just to do a single scene or even a single line. Or even worse, a day player or an extra that had to do that for even less screentime and less glory.

In retrospect, that was undoubtedly pretty rough on those actors, and I feel bad now. And that chicken came to roust HARD when I was doing Andromeda. The skill level for prosthetics make-up in Vancouver at the time just wasn't up to the Westmores' standards, and Brent Stait, who played Rev Bem, literally had to quit the show because he couldn't deal with the make-up anymore. I don't know if he'd have lasted longer if the Westmores had been in charge, but I suspect he might've.

I haven't been on a show that demanded heavy prosthetics since Andromeda, but what happened with Brent really stuck with me. Because of that, I've been much more aware of the toll that heavy make-up takes on actors, and I know I'll be much more cautiously about using it if I end up on another big space opera.

TL;DR - We didn't think about it, but we should have.