From Hot Dogs to Superheroes, How ‘Very Important People’ Creates Its Wildest Characters

Makeup department head Alex Perrone tells IndieWire about balancing new looks for new and returning guests in Season 3 of the Dropout series.

Whatever you have in your notes app, it is probably nowhere near as interesting (or as unhinged) as what makeup designer Alex Perrone has in hers. Perrone is the makeup department head for “Very Important People,” Dropout’s improvised interview show where Vic Michaelis plays a fictional version of herself that hosts a strange public access series, also called “Very Important People.” 

All year round, whether they’re in prep for a new season or finessing looks through production or working on other things, Perrone and director Tamar Levine are trading notes about what kind of characters — from sentient hot dogs to mumblecore-loving trolls — they can have on the show next. 

“Very Important People” is one of the more intensely collaborative projects on streaming, on Dropout or otherwise, and it’s built into the nature of the series. The core Season 3 production team of Michaelis, Levine, Perrone, costume designer Alisha Silverstein, producers Paul Robalino and David Kerns come up with ideas for “total transformations” — a superhero with the very mundane power of bubbles, for instance, or a giant baby, or a sentient flower. 

But even the “VIP” team has no idea what direction the guest actor will take the character in, since it’s improvised on the spot after the guest has spent hours, sometimes, with their eyes closed in the makeup chair — while waiting to be ambushed by the combination of paint and prosthetics from Perrone and her team.

“ We’ll start ideating for a few weeks with everybody, and then we start locking looks,” Perrone told IndieWire. “Throughout that process — say we’re doing 15 episodes — we’ll have three to four locked within the first three weeks, and those builds start happening. So as we’re building, we’re still pitching and creating more looks. So it goes up to the very end, once we have all the cast locked.” 

Sometimes, as with werewolf content creator with some body-ody-ody Diamond (Rachel Pegram), the inspiration for a character’s look comes from finding a specific prosthetic — a chest piece with six nipples, in that case. But there are looks that Perrone and the “VIP” have had brewing on a back burner since the show’s inception. There are also looks that have developed because the team took on the challenge of giving repeat guests like Lisa Gilroy and Zac Oyama completely new, surprise looks each season they show up. 

“ It’s nice to see [Gilroy] go from Season 1, this old woman look, to Season 2, a monster, and then Season 3, this kind of beautiful makeup, but she’s a clown,” Perrone said. “We knew we wanted to take her in a new direction and also do a big departure from Spencer. People love Spencer. We love Spencer. But we wanted to give Lisa a different direction to take her improv and something different for Vic to work with as well. We pulled through more of the beauty aspect of the makeup while still adding nuances that make it twisty and fun.” 

“Twisty and fun” is not a bad way to describe what unites all the different kinds of makeup and prosthetic work that the makeup team has to accomplish each season. It’s almost not quite right to refer to Perrone and her team’s to-do list as a variety of looks. “VIP” calls for really outlandish, unique characters like a giant rock person or a fully made-up hot dog person that would never be seen in film and television work (commercials, maybe). The show also includes looks that are really about preserving the performer’s face and employing subtle transformations via stubble or smaller prosthetic pieces. 

“[The large inanimate objects] are my favorite just because I love to see what the comedians do with it and it’s never what I anticipate,” Perrone said. “But there’s also something to be said for more pulled back characters where maybe their face comes through [and] you can add little nuances through makeup, something for them to pick up on — whether it be a silly mole or, this season, with Caitlin Reilly, we really pulled back everything and relied on our costume designer to take it to an outlandish place and see where the actor takes it.” 

It’s a very intentional balance between the more involved prosthetic looks and the more heightened human ones, both because it provides a good visual balance and fresh improv, and because of time and logistical constraints. Perrone gets about three custom pieces per season, during which they can fully scan, sculpt, and customize a look for an actor’s body. On a standard film or TV show, those builds might take months; “Very Important People” only has two months of prep and 15 episodes to shoot. 

But Perrone and her team have gotten increasingly good at finding and crafting just the right pieces to create complex makeup looks that seem to have taken much longer. More “VIP” actors in Season 3 now get eyes and teeth specially added for their character looks, and Perrone has a good hit list of places to go for interesting and odd applications on a quick turnaround, including RBFX Studio and Dyad Prosthetics. 

“ We pull from that, and rather than using them, maybe what they’re intended for, we add our own spin to them and make a new creation and make it unique for Dropout,” Perrone said. 

That, again, requires a full team effort both within the makeup department and across the entire “VIP” production team. One example from Season 3 is Sudzo (Eugene Cordero), a bubble-powered superhero. The initial producer’s pitch was for a low-rent superhero, but finding something that’s never been done for even a generic superhero is a challenge. It took a few weeks to land on ‘bubbles’ as the power. But then, how do you represent that? It took, if not improv, a lot of yes-and-ing between departments to get the look right.

“ That one evolved over weeks, and it was a complete collaboration between everybody,” Perrone said. “Something I really appreciate about ‘Very Important People’ is that it’s rare you have this much collaboration and time to really create something you’ve wanted to. They’re very open to different ideas, and those ideas evolve.  I think Dropout does such a good job representing their artists on the show.” 

“Very Important People” is streaming on Dropout.