For 30 years, Joel Harlow has been one of Hollywood’s premiere makeup artists, and come Oscar night, he’ll contend for his second Academy Award for his work on Star Trek Beyond, which required him to create more than 50 different alien species. A North Dakota native, Harlow took home a gold statuette for J.J. Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek reboot, and also received a nomination for 2013’s The Lone Ranger — one of his 16 collaborations with Johnny Depp. (Over the weekend, Harlow scored the Makeup Artists Guild Award for Best Makeup Effects for his Beyond work.)
Adding to a résumé full of blockbuster credits, Harlow will next put his talents to use for two upcoming superhero films — this March’s Logan, and next year’s Black Panther — as well as Depp’s fifth go-round as Captain Jack Sparrow in this summer’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Before any of those hit theaters, however, he spoke with us about the challenges of Star Trek Beyond, operating within the Marvel Cinematic Universe aesthetic, and his fondness for HP. Lovecraft.
You previously won an Oscar for 2009’s Star Trek, were you a big Star Trek fan growing up?Absolutely. I remember watching the original series in reruns as a child in Denver, Colorado, where my father and mother were born, and where we’d vacation from North Dakota every summer and every Christmas. My first memory of Star Trek is sitting in my grandmother’s house watching the original episodes on her old TV. So yeah, I was absolutely a fan as a child. It’s so much a part of those vacations and that sort of childhood experience, it’s impossible for me to separate the two.
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Was that fondness for the franchise how you first became involved with the new films?It was a fluke! It was a very lucky coincidence, and came out of the blue for me. I was called by a friend of mine to help in his studio building and designing aliens for the 2009 Star Trek. Ultimately, what I became was sort of the point man on-set for him, where I would take the prosthetics that they were still building in the shop, and I’d manage everything on set.
There were some problems back at the shop with some of the prosthetics that were being turned out. I had done the Pirates films previous to this, and [unit production manager] Tommy Harper and [executive producer] Jeffrey Chernov knew that, and thus came to me and asked me if I wouldn’t mind sort of running it.
We were still figuring out two races — the Romulans and the Vulcans — and they asked me if I wouldn’t mind running the department for those two races, like I did on Pirates. Which means I set up, internally, a makeup effects lab that was also a makeup effects application department. I said, “Yeah, I’ll do that,” and then my friend continued to build the background aliens, and I took over the Vulcans and designed the Romulans. We just started making and testing them there on the Paramount lot, and ultimately, we found the look that J.J. [Abrams] liked, and we ran with it.
This year was the 50th Anniversary of the Star Trek franchise. Were there any ways in which you tried to pay homage to the series’ history in Star Trek Beyond?Certainly. Being a fan, I wanted to deliver something to the fans, like myself, that they’d never seen before in a Star Trek film. There have been dozens and dozens of wonderful alien characters in the Star Trek franchise, so we wanted to give them something more because it was the 50th anniversary. And not just a little bit more — a LOT more, in terms of quality, hopefully, and also quantity as well. So we wound up building 56 different alien species for the film.
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