It’s been five years since Margot Robbie made a scene-stealing turn as Sharon Tate in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and fans might be interested to learn how the actress — who is soon to be a first-time mom — transformed into the late starlet.
The film is a fictional story set in Hollywood around the time of the grisly Manson Murders, which tragically claimed the lives of Tate, her unborn child, and four other people. In Tarantino’s film, Robbie took on the role of the actress who was taken too soon, and Us Weekly revealed details on how she achieved the look.
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Robbie’s makeup artist on set, Heba Thorisdottir, opened up and shared how she helped make it happen. “Margot Robbie is iconic in her own way. She has a huge fan base and I wanted to honor both women,” Thorisdottir explained, so she focused on Robbie’s attributes, specifically her prominent eyebrows. Also, “because Quentin didn’t want to use any prosthetics, he wanted everything out of kits and that goes across every actor in the movie, we wanted the actors to look as natural as possible.”
Thorisdottir shared that when Robbie walked into the makeup room for the first time, she thought, “She resembles Sharon, for sure.” She knew that her first job was going to be plucking Robbie’s eyebrows to thin them out a bit. However, she eventually realized “the more I was plucking away, the further I got from Sharon, so we stayed away from plucking them too much, which I hope honored both women.”
As far as skin care, Thorisdottir boasted: “I’ve prided myself before that almost always people end the movie with better skin than what they came in with.” Every morning in the makeup trailer, she’d start with candles and “we’d put hot towels into the towel oven so they’re hot when the actors get in, so if the guys need to shave they have one and they can start with clean skin.”
Moving on to skin tone, Thorisdottir said, “We used a lot of tanners, in all sorts of forms.” She later added, “It was a huge status symbol to have a pool [in the late ’60s],” therefore they used a lot of “liquid tanners, sometimes we used darker foundations to tan the stars up. Sometimes it was just a little bronzer.”
Finally, when it comes to Tate’s iconic eye makeup, Thorisdottir says that she used a cake eyeliner so that the center of the lid would be the focus. “Then I just used a brush to shape the pigment like a banana,” she said, adding, “They called it the banana, that line in the crease of the eye.”
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is currently available to stream on Hulu.
