An Interview with
Eryn Krueger Mekash | Department Head Make-Up
and Mike Mekash, Co-Department Head of Prosthetics
Photos Courtesy of Netflix
How did you both get involved with Stranger Things?
Mike Mekash: We were with Barrie and Sarah Gower at a party, and they asked if I would be interested in helping him out on a show. I was really overwhelmed that Barrie would even ask me. At that point, I was honored just by the gesture, even if it never happened. Maybe a year later, I got a call saying, “Hey, we need you to come out to Georgia. Can you dedicate yourself to these dates, which are very sporadic and spread out over months?” I just said, “Yes!”
There are a few people I will work for that I don’t ask details; it doesn’t matter what the job is, it doesn’t matter what the pay is, I just know it’s going to be something cool. That marked the beginning of Season 4, and working with Barrie and Duncan Jarman on Vecna.
Eryn Krueger Mekash: As such a huge fan of the show, I told Mike that if I was ever going to do super-intense episodic television again, I would want it to be a show like Stranger Things—it gets everything right. The 1980s have never looked this accurate across the board: hair, make-up, costumes, props, and sets.
Much to my surprise, a few months later, I got a call to be a department head on Season 5 of this very show. It took me a few weeks to wrap my head around moving to Atlanta for 13 months, but I talked to Barrie and Sarah Gower, who both said, “Do it!” They also told me they were going to ask Mike to be the Co-Department Head of Prosthetics, which made the decision easier. We were going to load up our camper with our cats and drive across country. Little did we know, it would be another six months because of the SAG and WGA strikes.
Mike, you worked with Jamie Campbell Bower previously on Season 4, and you guys were all old buddies with Barrie and Duncan. Tell me about what it was like working with the team on Season 5.
Mike: Starting Season 4, I showed up not knowing what I was being asked to do—it was a surprise, and I had no idea if it was to be part of the support team or a recurring character. Working with Jamie Campbell Bower on Season 4 is one of the best experiences of my career. He’s kind, hilarious, and never in a bad mood, so that was definitely a contributing factor to going back for Season 5. Six and a half hours of make-up was scaled back to 3½ hours for our version of Vecna 2.0; his body was partially missing in areas, and that’s just not something you can do with prosthetics. BGFX created an epic spandex suit for CGI replacement.
Eryn: The final season took place over a six-day period. We had a month to prep, and then 12 months of shooting. One of our challenges was maintaining the continuity of the characters’ injuries, which barely changed and had to be consistent throughout the entire year of filming.
Mike: Finding a solution for making sure everything looked the same every day over that length of time was the challenge. I had one actor in particular where, no matter what I did, nothing would stay on; I was constantly doing a full retouch-up of the injuries. I decided that I would make a tattoo transfer of his wounds, making it much easier if I just had to wipe it off and then completely reapply a new one, and make small changes for those six days. It became much easier to do the first and second units and stunts. This technique became a through-line with many of the characters’ injuries. I even used a 10% opacity template for blood continuity on one of Jamie’s other incarnations, Henry.
Eryn: I was a little worried about not free-handing the injuries, but Mike convinced me to go with tattoo transfers. Of course, we’ve been doing tattoo transfers for 25 years, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do them for continuity. I had all our artists establish the looks of the injuries on their actors. Mike took photos of everything, then created a transfer and printed them right in the trailer. We were doing that on the fly, establishing blood streaks, injuries, etc., which was a real benefit to all of us. This was the first year the Duffer Brothers had an on-set make-up designer, and Frank Darabont loved it, too.
Mike: Going into production meetings, we had a little bit of leeway to come up with our own designs. I would design in Procreate, then show the Duffers or Frank, giving them three different versions going from less to more extreme; always pushing for as extreme as possible, because that’s what we do! They were very open to that process, and I think they appreciated that we had already concepted the looks being discussed and trusted that we could deliver on what we had shown them. I would connect with Barrie, and we would design from a library of prosthetics.
Mrs. Wheeler’s Demogorgon injuries, for example. We could order specific skin tones in multiples, depending on how many shooting days they played, with a short turnaround time.
Eyrn: Having a library of prosthetic wounds is always something that I like to have as a part of my bag of tricks, and it seems to work really well for me in the past with other jobs that we’ve done. BGFX has such a beautiful assortment of injuries. We tried to get most of our prosthetic designs dialed in at the very beginning of 2024, so they were ready to go at a moment’s notice, since we were filming all eight episodes together.
Speaking of updates from previous seasons, the Duffers really wanted to have a new version of all the bloodwork for Season 5. A lot of fans know there is blue and red saturation in the series, which can be challenging for blood coloration, but this season also added in the Technicolor world of Henry’s mindscape, so everything had to be tested in different lighting scenarios and adjusted, as well as The Demogorgon blood. We wanted to make sure those colors popped with our injuries in any lighting scheme.
What’s your favorite look from the final chapter?
Mike: Besides the obvious—Vecna—I think one of my favorite make-ups would be on Alex Breaux, who played Akers, our season’s punching bag. The script said that during the fight with Hopper in the lab, he gets hit in the head with a glass full of liquid. Taking a cue from some facial acid burns that I had seen online, I approached the design not knowing if it was acid or some kind of Upside Down secret sauce. I was really happy with the way it was filmed and that it didn’t heal over during the course of our timeline. It started to have some yellow viscous fluids flowing out of it. It was fun to play with that make-up over the season.
What’s it like to be part of a global phenomenon as you close the chapter on the experience?
Eryn: Keeping everything a secret with tons of crazy paparazzi and social media for the whole year was a challenge!
Mike: Who doesn’t want to be part of a team that gets to cross the finish line for the grand finale?!?! Growing up, I would always look forward to the final episode of a show. It’s what people talk about at the water cooler. This was that opportunity, and we were both so privileged to be part of it.
Global phenomenon is exactly what it was. We watched it for the first time, along with everyone else. It was scary for us to watch! We held hands while watching the episodes, hoping everything we did would come out looking like we had planned. “You’re only as good as your last project” is how the saying goes, so there was a lot of stress that eventually turned into a lot of joy.
Eryn: One of the things I loved about working on the show is that I already knew that the creative departments were coming straight from the brilliant teams the Duffers put together over the years. Amy Parris was the costume designer, Sarah Hindsgaul and Kat Suhre, hair designer/Department Head Hair, were the basis of these looks in previous seasons. I was so proud of my incredible team—Devin Morales was my Co-Department Head of Make-up, Jessica Gambardella was my third, and Benji Dove was Millie Bobbie Brown’s personal make-up artist and also ran background for me.
We had up to 25 make-up artists working on units that overlapped; the main unit would start on stage as a split, then at night meet up with the second unit to hand off actor bags and wrap around 2 am, then the second unit would film till 7 am. We did that for six weeks. That was a small part of our year-long journey. We did tons of testing on blood, slime, melting rooms, and prosthetics throughout production, like most shows, ours just went on for a full year with no breaks. Other challenges filming was every conceivable weather front, swinging from 11 degrees to 100 degrees and back again over the course of the year. At one point, basecamp flooded up to the steps of our giant make-up and hair trailers and washed everything into a lake.
My job was getting this show to the finish line. I really wanted to make sure everyone—from the cast to the make-up team—was enjoying their time in the trailer during the last season. The cast all started the show when they were very young, and it was important for me to send them off into their careers post-Stranger Things, knowing they would enjoy coming into the make-up trailer and being part of the process of developing their characters.
My team was the most important part to me, and it could not have been successful last season without them. I hired everyone from past seasons and brought their collective talents together for a cohesive look in Season 5; it was much grittier and more realistic, and less stylized than other seasons. We had incredible bosses, and everybody felt they were an important part of making the show come together. •