Inside Cruella’s Punk-Fantasy Makeup Looks and Ever-Changing Wigs

If Disney’s new Cruella is the origin story of a high-glamour villain—with Emma Stone slipping into the deliciously deranged character and her black-and-white wig—the catalytic scene arrives early in the film. The setting is a baroness’s estate, in the swing of a raucous costume ball. A woman has stopped by with her wild-child daughter Estella (two-toned hair hidden under a hat) to ask for money. Things don’t end well for the mother, who tumbles off a cliff with help from the baroness’s dog whistle and Dalmatians. That much is enough to set a grief-stricken girl on her path to becoming Cruella. 

But that’s not the only inflection point. When Estella steals inside the party, wide-eyed at the sight of pastel-powdered wigs and ballooning skirts, it is something of a creative coup de foudre. Estella has found her calling—her “London Calling,” you could say, given that the rest of the movie is set against the backdrop of 1970s British punk.

However much the film is a fashion duel between established designer (the baroness, played by Emma Thompson) and iconoclast upstart (Cruella), many of its most show-stopping creations sit above the neck, courtesy of hair and makeup designer Nadia Stacey. Cruella’s black-and-white hair is, by turns, curled, shagged, and piled high in neo-Romantic fashion. The character’s makeup similarly swings from everyday glamour—matte red lipstick, smoky eye, well-powdered skin—to virtuosic flourishes. In a sequence of flash appearances designed to upstage the baroness, Cruella tumbles out of a garbage truck wearing an 18th-century wig, or turns up by motorcycle with “The Future” airbrushed across her eyes (a Sex Pistols nod) and red crystals precariously glued onto her lips. 

Speaking by phone from London, Stacey unpacked the unlikely synchronicity between Cruella and her last project with Stone (Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, set in Queen Anne’s court) and talked about the iconic women who turned up on early mood boards. She also shared the pared-down products she used to create Cruella’s iconic makeup—prioritizing speed and ease, which feels as right for the free-wheeling character as it does for the summer of 2021. 

Vanity Fair: I loved that you worked on The Favourite, which is the rare period piece where makeup really gets a laugh. How was it to team up with Emma Stone again for Cruella?

Nadia Stacey: It could not have been any more different in terms of makeup. When we did The Favourite, the director, Yorgos, would come and put his finger on her face and if he could see makeup he’d be like, “Take it off.” He really wanted her really stripped back with bare skin. And then you go to Cruella, and I don’t think she could have had more makeup on her face! It was just so much fun to be able to play to that degree. 

I’m sure the Venn diagram of the two films is small, but was there any overlapping research—given that early scene in Cruella with the courtly splendor?

I suppose I hadn’t thought about it. I have worked with a mass room of those period 18th-century wigs, so to do that for those opening scenes was a world I was slightly more familiar with. On The Favourite, I’d sprayed some of the wigs in different colors and covered them in colored chalks, and I did something similar on this. If [the camera] came in close on the crowd, you would see that there are pinks and blues, and there are butterflies in their hair and flowers. We kind of went for it.

One of the big moments in The Favourite is the badger makeup, which is a kind of band across her eyes. And in Cruella there were a lot of mask-like makeups because she’s disguising herself from the baroness. I don’t think I was conscious of that, but maybe it’s going to be my thing! 

What were the early starting points for Cruella, in terms of shared references with the creative team? 

A very, very early reference was the German singer called Nina Hagen. She was on one of [director] Craig [Gillespie]’s early mood boards, and then she turned up again in some of our references. We all seemed to have this same photo of Nina Hagen: She’s got this painted face and very red hair, and there was something about the kind of spirit of her that we all kept coming back to. So when I went to the wig makers, I was like, “I want the hair to be that color”—so the red almost matches exactly to that photo.

And surrounding that was punk. I’d seen what Fiona [Crombie], our production designer, was doing—she’d built the “lair,” as they called it. I thought, somebody that lives there has a kind of feral quality to them. They’re squatting in this house. The thing with early punk, it’s not the punk that everyone thinks of as glamorous, where everyone’s spraying their hair different colors. They almost looked like street urchins! They looked like something from a Charles Dickens novel rather than a fashion runway. It was striking that balance [between] “we’re making an indie punk film, but we’re also making a Disney film.” It’s finding the beauty in that. I look at people like Nina Hagen and Debbie Harry, who’s a bit more obviously commercial and [classically] beautiful, but there’s still that roughness around the edges. It’s this real mix of beauty and a mess. 

There is a mashup of past and present in that era, which I think it comes through in your work: Emma’s hair in a courtly beehive with punk makeup.

The thing is, everything has been done before. It’s how you take it and change it. [With] punk, that’s exactly what they were doing. If you Google “Vivienne Westwood hair,” one of the first pictures that pops up is her with a sort of 18th-century shape to her hair—but then the top of it is all backcombed and punked up. They took Edwardian suits and then lined them in a tartan fabric, or ripped them up and added safety pins. It was taking something that had come before and then messing it up. That’’s sort of what I wanted to do. The look where there’s “The Future” across Emma’s face—we could have just left it at that, but if I add a jeweled red lip, that takes it somewhere else.

How many wigs did you make for Emma?

Actually, not many for Emma at all. Looking back, that was one of the biggest challenges. Emma had actually hurt her shoulder, so the shoot got pushed by about six weeks and we didn’t get her until very close to shoot. I had—thank goodness—a head measurement of her from The Favourite, so we were able to get going with the wigs. But mostly it’s the same two wigs, changed with pieces added [in] or fringe put on it or length added to it.

That feels even more in sync with the character, who would be reinventing herself with whatever make-do means she had.

Totally. I often think, I never really want to do those jobs where everything’s at your disposal. I know that I’m a glutton for punishment, but if you’ve got 20 wigs all dressed on the side and they’re all perfect, does that take the spirit out of it somehow? Would that be what Cruella did? I wanted to be changing and adapting and going along just the way that Cruella would. Like, what do we do today? Let’s change this, let’s change that bit. It sort of added to the challenge, in a way.

The movie has these major makeup transformations when she’s punking the baroness. They happen in a blink, but they’re impactful. Was there one that felt particularly resonant for you?

I loved doing all those. We knew they were going to be quick flash moments, and because of that, the pressure was off again. You could go all out because you knew that it wasn’t going to be a huge scene with dialogue. I really loved the one where she climbs on top of the [baroness’s] car, when she’s got a crown on top of her head and dark metallics all around her eyes and a very, very, very dark lip. I loved the garbage truck look, too—the fact that she turns up in a garbage truck and then comes out with an 18th-century wig and jewels all over her face.

I’m really proud of the feather mask as well. We didn’t know how she could first turn up at the baroness’s [ball]—with what makeup to disguise herself? [It started with] a pair of cheap feather eyelashes that I just turned upside down and stuck on the bottom [lash]. I then started to build out with feathers and jewels from that pair of eyelashes. That became the mask. Thank goodness we didn’t have to recreate it. Every single jewel is individually laid onto her face; every feather, too. Luckily we shot that all in one day. 

And then there is her everyday, full-tilt makeup—which is a really good advertisement for long-wear matte formulas. What were the staples in your kit?

I just wanted that to be believable, even for Cruella, and also practical. The amount of time that you have in the chair with Emma—it had to be something that we could do quickly and recreate quickly. My assistant is amazing, and he’d worked for MAC makeup for years and had come from a fashion background. So every time I was going, “Right, I’m going to do this look and I’m going to use these products,” he would say, “Yeah, I think you could do that with one product though.” I’m like, “Really?” And it really did end up being the MAC Smolder pencil. When you blend it out, it goes to a kind of lovely gunmetal gray. That was the basis of the black to begin with. And then a powder from MAC called Shivering [White]—that was the basis for the white. We ended up with names of lipsticks that I thought were cool, like Lady Danger by MAC. I just liked the things that all felt like if Cruella were buying a lipstick, that’s what she’d buy. 

I love the fact that Cruella makeup starts with that Smolder pencil being roughly smudged all around the eyes really quickly. You can create a smoky eye like that, put on mascara, a killer red lip, and you’re ready to go. It’s doable! If we are going to come out of this [time] and be a bit braver with our look because we’ve all been sat in the house in our sweatpants, then maybe this feels like, “Oh, I could do that! I don’t need to be a makeup artist to do it.”

MAC eye kohl in Smolder

MAC matte lipstick in Lady Danger

MAC Studio Fix Pastels powder in Shivering White

NARS Powermatte lip pigment in Starwoman

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