If you had to guess which actor presented the biggest challenge for makeup and prosthetics in Amazon’s Fallout show, you’d probably pick The Ghoul: the rotting (yet charming) 200-year-old mutated Walton Goggins who’s missing his nose and covered with scar tissue. It’s a good guess: Goggins’ prosthetics took months to develop and hours to apply each day of shooting, but according to Michael Harvey, makeup department head for Fallout, that wasn’t the only challenge.
Ella Purnell, who played Vault Dweller Lucy, wound up being a major makeup challenge, too—just not for the reasons you might think.
“The one thing that a lot of people don’t know unless you’ve done a lot of research on Ella Purnell, she’s covered in tattoos. Head to toe, covered in tattoos, ” Harvey told PC Gamer. “And for pretty much all of episode one, she’s running around in a wedding dress.”
Since Purnell’s character was raised in an idyllic Vault, it wouldn’t make sense for her to have tattoos, “So every day for at least a month, I’m sitting there covering tattoos,” Harvey said. “Even down to when she’s exiting the super duper Mart, anytime her vault suit is down, I’m covering tattoos.”
But that wasn’t the only tricky element of Harvey’s job. Something else became “part of the biggest challenge” of handling Purnell’s makeup: her index finger.
Sorry for the spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet, but in one episode of Fallout, Lucy bites off The Ghoul’s finger. The Ghoul being The Ghoul, he immediately cuts off Lucy’s finger to replace his missing one. Not long after, a Mister Handy robot replaces Lucy’s finger with a spare he’s got in a drawer. Lucy’s finger problem was solved, but the makeup department’s was just beginning.
Since Lucy’s replacement finger is considerably paler than her skin (it’s a corpse’s finger, after all) and there’s a seam where it was basically welded to her stump, anytime Purnell’s hand was seen from then on in the show it needed to look like she had a weird dead finger attached to her, for continuity’s sake. This isn’t as easy as it sounds.
“It was such a chore, every day, I had to paint her finger,” he said. And not just once a day, Harvey said. Continuously throughout the day’s shooting he basically had to babysit her hand. “She’d pick up something, she’d put it in her pocket. She’d go wash her hands. Oop, gotta paint her finger [again].
“And the writers promised me, ‘Oh, by episode four, we’re gonna write something, that [the finger] heals, and you’ll never see it again.’ I’m like, ‘Great, thank you!'”
The writers never came through, however, and Harvey had to continue keeping tabs on Ella Purnell’s finger and touch it up constantly. That chore will apparently continue when Fallout returns. “You will see that finger in season two,” Harvey said.
Worth it? Well, Fallout is nominated for 16 Emmys, two of them for makeup: both for outstanding prosthetic and non-prosthetic makeup. So, yeah. Probably worth it.
