Emmy-Nominee Chris Glimsdale On Creating Hairstyles For the Acclaimed ‘Last of Us’ Episode “Long, Long Time”

The multi Emmy-nominated hair designer Chris Glimsdale gives details about her latest nominated work from HBO’s The Last of Us. Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Glimsdale reveals the details of aging up Frank and Bill and their wonderful love story in the acclaimed episode “Long, Long Time.” Then on the opposite end, she describes the intricate details and difficulty of creating the look of the infected. These extra touches are what gives this show the uniqueness in its post-apocalyptic world setting.

Awards Daily: How did having a video game model of a lot of the characters affect your work in making the hairstyles for the characters in the TV show?

Chris Glimsdale: It didn’t really affect us. We basically came to the decisions by the cast that we had in front of us. A little bit of the game came into play but not as much as you might think. It’s not as if we had to make them look exactly like their characters in the video game. We used it as a guideline. We wanted the same texture and depth in the way they looked in the video game: the grittiness and the dirtiness and the not washing and not having places to do certain things. We also went with what looked best for that actor and character together to create the look that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann wanted for their characters in the live version.

Awards Daily: So, for characters like Kathleen played by Melanie Lynskey who had no video game counterpart, what was the process of deciding on their look?

Chris Glimsdale: With deciding her look, we focused on giving her the texture and depth of her character to reflect everything that she has been through in the underground movement. We also wanted to give her the worriedness that she needed. She didn’t need anything fancy. She did not have product. She didn’t have hair color. She didn’t have anything along those lines. We decided to go with her natural hair texture and go from there with her wardrobe and makeup and just create that solid look of an underground power person.

Awards Daily: You are nominated for episode three, “Long, Long Time,” which is pretty much the most acclaimed episode of the show where we watch Frank and Bill fall in love and live their life together. That included a lot of aging them during the episode. Can you talk about your decisions and crafting that?

Chris Glimsdale: When Nick Offerman [Bill] came to us he had shorter hair, which really didn’t fit that character of a survivalist / wilderness man. We needed to create something that gave us that — for lack of a better word — “redneckish” longer hair. Not a hippie look but similar to that texture. When we did that, we decided he needed a wig. I went to Rob Pickens at Wigmaker Associates, and we created this wonderful wig for him with the textured density and the length that we needed. From there, we put it on him and started creating the look. We started cutting it where we needed to cut it, and we had the colors and everything designed. As he aged, I went in and hand-painted single strands of gray in different dimensions and colors. I also tied some gray hairs into the first wig. As we aged him even more, we created a second wig that was a lot thinner in density with a lot more gray texture. We also decided to go shorter and more refined. As he aged, he also became more of what Frank would have wanted because Frank was obviously cutting his hair. Frank would say, “I’m going to clean you up a little bit,” because Frank liked that refined, clean texture to things. Where Bill was a little bit wilder with an “I don’t really care about that” kind of idea. We see him getting older and more gray and the hair gets a little bit shorter and more refined. When we get to that point, we did create that wig to give us the less dense hair because as we age we obviously get less dense. There were a few color dimensions that we decided to put in to create more features on his face. We then cleaned him up like he took a brush and combed his hair after a shower instead of just leaving it wild and crazy. That’s what we did for Bill.

For Frank, Murray Bartlett came to us off of White Lotus, so we couldn’t really change anything because he was still doing promos. When he is introduced, we see he is quite dirty and hasn’t cut his hair for a while because he has been on the run and hiding. We filled in all of his receding hairline with hair pieces that I had designed and pulled through, and we hand laid some hair in there. We also got rid of his natural gray by airbrushing what he had and then added some hair extensions to the back to give him that fullness. As he aged, we started taking some of that away and doing less airbrushing. More of his natural gray started coming through. We used the same process with the receding hairlines and started adding some gray through there. As he aged even more, we took away the extensions in the back. In the sequence when they’re on the street arguing before they have dinner with Joel and Anna, his hair is short in the back, but he still has the pieces on top with the added gray. As we kept going from there through the strawberry patch scene, we used more and more gray. As we go through the dinner sequence when he is deciding he no longer wants to live, we added a lot more gray by hand-painting and airbrushing that in to create the depth, texture, and shadows of where we needed it on his face for the makeup. From there, we took out all the receding hair pieces and pulled back even further. That really gives us the aging process. The more you pull away from someone’s face, the more hollow it is, the more people see age.

Awards Daily: You also did the hair for the infected, which looks so much like the game versions.  It was really quite impressive. But it must have been incredibly hard to get it around all the fungal things on the face. What was it like to craft all that?

Chris Glimsdale: The Gowers (Barrie Gower and Sarah Gower) are amazing and Paul Spateri and his team Nelly (Guimaras), Johnny (Murphy), and Lucy (Pittard). We worked really close with them, especially with the majorly infected. They would put on the prosthetics, we would do the base work, and then they would apply the prosthetics, get all the painting done to a certain point. At that point when we start to blend in where the hair really was, where the pieces were and how to get everything to move together among all the fungal pieces, we would work together and hand lay those strands of hair in between all the mushrooms and the cordyceps. From there, we laid some lace pieces depending on where they were, but they were hand cut and hand laid every single time. They were all individual pieces. We tried to form them but everything was just a little bit more difficult. So we matched the hair color, matched the texture, then went in with tiny little needles and Q-tips and brushes to get into those little areas. The detail was intense.

That was what it was all about: everything on this show was about detail and getting in there. I think that’s what makes it such a special series. Even the smallest things down to a piece of mouse poop (which is not my department), but those little details make a big difference. Even interlaying the hair and then a little fungal strip over the top to intertwine it really blended in the look. That technique really helped create all the infected people and make them look so real and intense so, no matter how close you got or how far away you got, you still saw that detail. It’s like looking at the mountains, and you’re hundreds of miles away but you can still see the details of the mountains. That is what we wanted to portray–the detail that we put into it–and I think we did a really good job between all of us in hair, makeup, and wardrobe in creating those infected and having all that detail.

Awards Daily: Are you a fan of the game at all?

Chris Glimsdale: I never played the game. I am not a gamer, but I really enjoyed the Naughty Dogs book on creating the game and how they developed the characters. That was a big part for me. I did watch a lot of YouTube videos of the game just to see what everyone was so excited about. I think they did a great job of transforming it back and forth. My friend’s son is a massive gamer, and the show really hit it on the nose with the way it looks and the way it’s performed.

Awards Daily: So this is your fourth Emmy nomination in this category.  Has it been different this time at all? Or was it similar to the other times you were nominated?

Chris Glimsdale: It has been different in the sense that we seem to be getting a lot more recognition. Whether that’s just the timing of it with the game being the game or with the timing of just the way life is right now. It doesn’t seem like the creative parts get as much attention as the actors when it comes to the awards stuff. Maybe with the actors being on strike we are getting a little bit more attention. It isn’t any different from the other nominations in the sense that I still feel humbled. I still feel overwhelmed with the fact that we got nominated again, me being from  a small town in Alberta. I love what I do, but I never think that I’m above or do anything that anyone else wouldn’t do. So I’m so blessed that people feel my work is worth awarding. I’m so grateful for my team that worked with me and the fact that they led me through it and kept me going: Penny (Thompson), Judy (Durbacz), and Eva (Baulackey). They keep me alive, and they are my hands really. They keep me going forward, so I’m so grateful for that.

Awards Daily: Are you going to be involved in season two?  Or is there anything else coming up for you right now?

Chris Glimsdale: Right now, I’m starting on The Abandons, so if that ends at the right time, then we’ll see what happens. With the strike and everything happening, it’s hard to say where we are headed. Right now, I’m on season one of The Abandons, which is a Netflix series with Kurt Sutter as showrunner. We will see what happens from there.

Awards Daily: Final thoughts?

Chris Glimsdale: My only thoughts are that I want everyone to know that I am so blessed that I had my Alberta team and that I’m very grateful for all the 35 artists that came from Alberta. We did a boot camp and everyone did an amazing job of learning the process of working with the infected, learning how to lay hair and lay the pieces. I am grateful for everyone there. I am grateful for the Gowers  letting me go forward and do the infected. It has been amazing.