Instead of diving deep into the backstories of the country’s many First Ladies, Showtime’s The First Lady zooms in on just three: Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama. Though limited in scope, this still meant that makeup department head Carol Rasheed and her team had more than 100 years of history to cover, from Mrs. Roosevelt’s younger years in the late 1800s to the modern-day Mrs. Obama.
“Artistically, that was absolutely a phenomenal opportunity to be able to do that,” Rasheed says of the challenge to hit every decade from the 1890s to the 2010s. “It took tons and tons of research to do a project like this.”
Ahead, BAZAAR.com gets the breakdown of everything that went on behind the camera to transform Gillian Anderson (who plays Eleanor Roosevelt), Michelle Pfeiffer (Betty Ford), and Viola Davis (Michelle Obama) from leading ladies into First Ladies.
The Key Players
Carol Rasheed, armed with three decades’ worth of experience, led a staff of anywhere from four to 15 throughout production. Each of the show’s three stars had their own personal makeup artist: Julie Kendrick transformed Anderson into Mrs. Roosevelt, Valli O’Reilly morphed Pfeiffer into Mrs. Ford, and Sergio Lopez-Rivera turned Davis into Mrs. Obama. “It was just a makeup artist’s dream, to be honest with you,” Rasheed says. “I am so ecstatic about the opportunity that I got with this, to be able to bring this team on and be able to help tell the story through the lens of makeup artists.”
The team worked with prosthetics, though not on the three main actresses. Kiefer Sutherland, playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, needed a fuller neck, Rasheed says; O-T Fagbenle, playing President Barack Obama, needed prosthetic ears to match the former commander in chief’s trademark feature. On each of the three women, aging techniques were employed as they matured throughout the series, as “all three of those ladies had to be aged considerably,” Rasheed says. “Michelle Obama didn’t have to be aged as much, because her story is a little more contemporary. But Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Ford had to be aged considerably. It’s amazing [what happens] when you take off a little bit of makeup and let your natural skin bleed through. We’d add age spots here and there, along with some topical aging products, and add discoloration to the teeth. There are so many things you can do to age people, like putting a little gray in the brows.”
The key was getting granularly down to the details, Rasheed says, studying images and footage from the lives of the women being portrayed and noticing everything. “It could be something as simple as how their lipstick was applied to ‘were their brows thicker this year or thinner in another year?’” she says. “Those little nuances are what really help develop a character to fullness.”
Becoming Michelle Obama
“When you look at somebody like Michelle Obama who is known for her teeth, helping create her smile develops her character,” Rasheed says. “You have to look at getting the skin tone correct, her hands, her nails, her brows specifically—with Michelle Obama, her brows went through an awakening. Sergio [Lopez-Rivera, Viola Davis’s personal makeup artist] was tasked with that—and he got it right.”
For Mrs. Obama’s mouth, Lopez-Rivera created a prosthetic bumper that helped push her chin forward slightly. For her brows, “I had a Vacuform mold of Viola’s forehead made so I could create stencils of Michelle’s eyebrows through the years,” he says. “This helped make changes much faster and ensured continuity.”
Rasheed says scenes between President and Mrs. Obama “really made me realize, ‘Wow, this is incredible,’” she says. “I was like, ‘Wow, she really looks like Michelle, and he really looks like Barack.’ It was uncanny how much everyone looked like these historical figures.”
In charge of the hair department for the Michelle Obama block was Louisa Anthony, who worked with Davis’s personal hairstylist, Jamika Wilson, to turn Davis into Mrs. Obama.
“The scene where Viola is at a photo shoot with the now historic black-and-white dress—Ms. V embodied Michelle,” Anthony says. To nail this embodiment, “research was key to accuracy,” Wilson says. “I did a lot of Google searches to study the hairstyles of Michelle Obama over her eight years in the White House. Each style has its own identity, and it was important to re-create the styles with accuracy.” It’s a transformation Anthony calls “magical.”
“Michelle Obama had many iconic hairstyles over her eight years in office, each unique with its own identity,” Wilson says. “The hairstyles were curated and created specific to her, and as such, re-creating them had to be done with precise measure and attention to detail.”
Becoming Eleanor Roosevelt
For Mrs. Roosevelt’s more youthful years, Gillian Anderson’s personal makeup artist, Julie Kendrick, used collagen eye patches, gel blush, as well as custom false teeth. For the years 1930 to 1935, Kendrick utilized lighting and shading techniques along with maquillage foundation creams (“old-fashioned greasepaint, basically”) to conceptualize Roosevelt’s maturing look. For the era between 1940 and 1948, Kendrick used aging light and shade makeup and broken capillaries with greasepaint to achieve the look. “She looked exquisite,” Rasheed says of Anderson.
Roosevelt hair department head Colleen LaBaff also worked with Kendrick to create Mrs. Roosevelt’s hair, which spanned 46 years. “I watched the documentaries from Ken Burns and found pictures I had not seen anywhere else,” LaBaff says of her abundant research. “It was amazing.” For the entire Roosevelt block—not just Mrs. Roosevelt—LaBaff and her staff of nearly 30 hairstylists used 131 wigs for the characters. “Transforming any actor into a very famous character that everyone knows is challenging and difficult, and can be stressful until it is just right,” LaBaff says. “You have to see everything on camera from all angles, movement, lights, action, and then see how the hair or wig moves and how the actors move. Then you can say, ‘We nailed it.’”
Kendrick used five wigs for Mrs. Roosevelt, which “helped provide the passage of time through the different decades of changing fashions, which Eleanor Roosevelt did a lot—she very much moved with the times,” she says. “Gillian is a very petite, glamorous actress, and Eleanor Roosevelt was larger than Gillian. Therefore, we needed to create more of a square shape with her look within the wig dressings.”
Becoming Betty Ford
“The transformation with her was so amazing,” Rasheed says. “There would be days I’d look at Betty Ford and forget I was looking at Michelle Pfeiffer. She was almost a carbon copy of her—it was really incredible what Valli did with Michelle.”
Pfeiffer’s personal makeup artist, Valli O’Reilly, took Mrs. Ford from the 1940s to the late 1980s, employing about five or six wig changes and adjusting her makeup with each switch.
“Betty Ford was not a woman who wore a lot of makeup,” O’Reilly says. “She did wear some, and it was always subtle. She always looked put together in public in a classic way. Most women in those years never left the house without lipstick and their hair done.”
To make the look happen, Pfeiffer wore false eyelashes for the younger years, but none for the older Mrs. Ford. “I changed the shape of Ms. Pfeiffer’s nose slightly to resemble Betty’s more prominent nose and narrowed her lips to resemble the shape of Betty’s mouth,” O’Reilly says. “I also had her eyebrows darker and thicker for the younger years, and lighter and sparser for the aging Betty. There were quite a few scenes where Betty was drinking and drunk or hopped up on pills, and we had to have Betty looking broken down. She had quite a few episodes before ending up in rehab.”
The research was so on point for the characters in the show that, for example, Pfeiffer exactly mimicked the few shades of lipstick Mrs. Ford actually wore, including Revlon’s Orange Flip and Love That Red. “They still exist,” O’Reilly says. “I substituted an orange by Lisa Eldridge for the brighter orange color.”
“It is definitely difficult to transform a well-known woman into another well-known woman,” says Lawrence Davis, the hair department head for the Betty Ford block of The First Lady, who worked with Pfeiffer’s personal hairstylist, Jaime Leigh McIntosh, to create the hair transformation. “I always like to collaborate with my actress. I bring my ideas to the table, and she brings hers. The total and final look is what helps my actress bring forth her best work.”
Davis used about 65 wigs for the Ford block, five of which were used on Pfeiffer. “Betty went through a few different styles and hair colors throughout her time before, during, and after the White House, so I really had to do my homework to figure that out,” McIntosh says. “As far as styling the wigs, even though many of the styles were of a period when hair was ‘set’ and ‘done’ and certainly has some height, I avoided using too much product, because we still wanted the hair to have movement—to be able to help sell that it was a real head of hair. … When it comes to styling products and wigs, less is more.”
Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family. She has contributed to publications like Allure, Bustle, Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Elle, Glamour, Glossy, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, Marie Claire, Midwest Living, People, Southern Living, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others, and is the editor of What Meghan Wore, a site dedicated to the Duchess of Sussex’s fashion, lifestyle, and work. Rachel is also the cohost of Podcast Royal, a show that examines the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world, and is the host of I’d Rather Be Reading, which spotlights the best current reads and interviews the authors of them.
