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Vincent Van Dyke is a triple Emmy nominee this year, which also means that he’s competing against his own work in the outstanding-prosthetic-makeup category. But that’s not a bad problem to have, he says. “They’re so different in general, the shows. So it’s almost hard to compare them in many ways.”
Indeed, his work this past season includes the stellar sci-fi creatures on Star Trek: Picard, the aging work on Angelyne, and the subtle prosthetics needed for the political series Gaslit, a trio of projects that could not be more different. It’s not the first time that this veteran creator (who now has a total of 11 nominations, with one win) has competed against his own work either: In 2020 he was nominated for American Horror Story: 1984, Hollywood, and Picard, winning for the latter.
So while his work can be seen all over the small screen, Van Dyke says he’s often proudest when it goes unnoticed. “Often, my favorite stuff that we’ve ever done is the type of work that you have no idea that we were even there,” says Van Dyke. “Maybe it’s a subtle nose bridge or it’s something that is just enough to help make the character something else, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that there’s prosthetics involved.”
Here, Van Dyke breaks down his nominated work, revealing the creative way he and his collaborators were able to bring aliens, politicians, and a 700-pound man to life.
One of Van Dyke’s main tasks on the Peacock series about the L.A. icon Angelyne was aging star Emmy Rossum up and down for a series that follows the character from age 17 to 70. “It’s a huge, broad spectrum of age,” he says. “There’s never a look that Emmy doesn’t have some form of prosthetic makeup on. Even in that youngest look, she’s got a nose piece on.”
It wasn’t just Rossum who had to be aged, but the supporting actors. And because Angelyne was known for getting plastic surgery, her character couldn’t exactly be counted on for showing the true passage of time. Van Dyke says Angelyne makeup artist Kate Biscoe put it best when she said that some of these other characters are actually the benchmark of true aging. “You do have characters like Martin Freeman’s character, who is aging much more naturally,” he says. “And it registers with you.”
While Van Dyke also worked on Rossum’s chest prosthetics, he says that age makeup is by far his favorite part of his job, and the most challenging. “We all know what a human being looks like as they age. We’re around people every day. So it is very, very easy to create something that feels just slightly off, that doesn’t feel like it’s hitting the mark,” he says. “I think that because it’s so challenging is why I can continue to love it because I never feel like I’m hitting it. I’m always feeling like I’m chasing this goal of trying to create something that feels as absolutely real as I possibly can.”
On Starz’s political thriller Gaslit, Van Dyke got to work with Kazu Hiro, the Oscar-winning prosthetics and makeup maestro behind Darkest Hour and Bombshell. “He’s somebody who I put on a pedestal as one of the absolute best. So when we’re able to work with him, it’s quite an honor,” says Van Dyke.
Van Dyke was tasked with creating the prosthetic pieces after Kazu had designed them, and he put a lot of focus on Sean Penn’s character John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general and chairman of his presidential campaigns. “It’s a brand-new set of prosthetics for every day—they get destroyed after that removal at the end of the day,” he says.
Among his other tasks was a four-piece broken-down bald cap for Shea Whigham. “I’ve been breaking bald caps down in this very specific way lately. And he was a great testing ground for it to get something that was fitting very tight, very close to his head and just moved with him really well,” he says.
For the second season of the sci-fi series, Van Dyke and his collaborators brought to life the Borg Queen, which allowed them to use some of the newest technology in their field. Played by Annie Wersching, the Borg Queen has a mix of humanoid and synthetic material that makes up her being. “She was daunting in many ways,” says Van Dyke.
For the crown, they utilized 3D printer technology. “It is actually straight off the printer,” says Van Dyke. “It’s attached to a little helmet and then there are multiple silicone prosthetics that then overlap each other and seamlessly blend into this crown.” He was also able to add lighting elements within the crown that pulsate.
The first season of Picard, for which Van Dyke won the Emmy, was a much broader challenge because the show introduced a huge universe of different-looking aliens and creatures. “That was one of the biggest undertakings of my career, because the volume was so insane. It was just massive, massive numbers of Romulan and ex-Borgs and Vulcan,” he says, adding that his team rented out an additional 5,000 square-foot facility that was dedicated just to Picard.
Even though Picard is a very sci-fi show, Van Dyke says he approaches the work no differently from how he would a series set in the real world, often pulling inspiration from references like sea creatures or other plants or animals in nature. “Because even if it is otherworldly and it looks like something fantastical, to me, the most important thing is that it’s based in reality,” he says. “So the audience isn’t questioning whether this is something that could actually exist. And I think that’s one of the most difficult things when you are doing sci-fi is to make it feel like it’s grounded.”
Van Dyke remembers that the series moved at a breakneck speed, especially when creating the swamp monster played by V. Nixie. It’s a quick scene in which the lake monster appears to pull someone into the lake, but it required complex, full-body prosthetic makeup. Nixie is wearing full facial prosthetics, a full chest piece, a back piece, arm pieces, a lace wig, denture elements, and contact lenses. “It’s this really kind of gross, boggy, swampy creature,” he says. “I was really happy with the way it came out. It was very disturbing.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Van Dyke’s other 2020 nomination was for his work on the Ryan Murphy–produced period show Hollywood. The makeup done on Jake Picking to play Rock Hudson was a key example of the type of work Van Dyke does that may not be noticeable to the average viewer, but really helps the actor get into the role. “He had a great face. It was just about pushing him a little bit,” says Van Dyke. “Whenever we’re doing these likeness makeups, my approach is always trying to bring the essence of the character, not trying to do a full likeness. I find that if you’re trying to do a full likeness, you’re covering up your talent so much that you’re essentially creating a mask.”
Van Dyke says they added a lower lip piece, a nose piece, lobes, eyelids, and dentures to subtly change Picking’s face. “I think there are a lot of people that wouldn’t realize that he has that many pieces on,” he says.
For another project based on real-life icons, Van Dyke created subtle prosthetics for the series about famed choreographer Bob Fosse and dancer Gwen Verdon, played respectively by Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams. “They were mostly what we call direct-mold transfers. They were very, very thin, very translucent pieces that were age and character for the most part, just to help push them in a really subtle way,” he says.
Van Dyke, who joined the FX medical drama for its fifth season, says he loved watching the show as much as he enjoyed working on it. The nominated “Enigma” episode featured a full-body transformation on a punk rock character with tattoos across his face and body, including a 666 carved into his forehead. As they did for many of the scenes in the drama, set at a plastic surgery practice, they had to create a full-body prosthetic duplication that would be used in the surgery scenes as well. “It was a great training ground for me to really learn a lot about how to execute that stuff on a TV schedule, really, really fast, and set me up for what we do today,” he says.
Van Dyke earned his first Emmy nomination for the hit ABC medical drama. It was early in his career, and he was a freelance prosthetic artist, sculptor, and painter. He landed a position at Burman Studio, a makeup effects studio founded in the early 1980s by husband and wife team Tom and Bari Burman. “They took me under their wings. They’re absolutely, still to this day, my mentors,” he says, adding that they gave him the tools and foundation that would eventually lead him to found his own company.
For the 2010 nominated episode “How Insensitive,” Van Dyke was tasked with using makeup and prosthetics to create a 700-pound man who would be a patient at the hospital. “It’s probably one of the things that I’m most proud of in my entire career, honestly,” he says. “We basically had to create a full-body, head-to-toe, overweight prosthetic suit for this actor.”
The suit, which was created in two weeks, had to look and move like skin. They then added on a full facial prosthetic that overlapped with and blended into the suit. “And then everything was pre-painted with hand-punched hair,” he says. “It was an insane amount of work. I literally look back at it and I go, ‘I have no idea how we pulled that off.’”
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