 
GW: Well, for old times sake you have always been great. I am sure they will bring you back. But, I'd like to backtrack real quickly if I can. Where did the ambition for becoming a make-up artist come from? What in your childhood, or in your young adult life said, "I want to do this."
JN: Oh, it was never anything in my childhood, trust me. I wanted to be a flight attendant. [Laughter] I went to nursing school in Australia and I became an Air Hostess in those days with Ansett Airlines. Because I had to become a nurse to be a Cabin Attendant in those days I went through nursing school and then I came to Canada and met my husband.
So we stayed here and I went back to nursing. I also had the opportunity to volunteer in theater. So my make-up background, basically, was doing theater, opera and live music theater. So as I said previously, it was one of the best experiences.
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Continuity photos, like this of Tom McBeath in "Paradise Lost," allowed make-up artists to be consistent with their appliances. |
Then when television became very productive we'd do live-to-air productions. We used to do dramas, live dramas, sometimes on video. Great experience. Then, after being in theater, we used to do commercials, live shows and things. So yeah, then I came to Vancouver and started all over again! [Laughter]
I've never done theater since, which is very interesting because it is one of my first lead-ins. The opportunity is not so great any more because they are kind of closed shop, I suppose.
If you belong to one union ... there's two different types of unions, the theater and then there's the film, television division.
GW: You're kind of in the television one now.
JN: Yeah! And happily so. [Laughter]
GW: So you spent a number of the years on the set doing make-up. A number of items that have been auctioned off over the years are all of your Polaroid's. Where you would take [pictures of scenes] for continuity.
JN: Are you serious?
GW: Yeah! Those go for, like, 125 bucks on eBay. You know, one Polaroid.
JN: No kidding ...
GW: How many did you take over the years? You must have taken thousands. I remember coming on set in Season Nine and you had switched to a digital camera.
JN: Well, let me see. When I left after Continuum, all of the archival things, everything that belonged to Stargate, went into their locker room. I often wondered whether or not anybody ever knew they were there. Obviously somebody does! [Laughter]
So I don't have any of the Polaroid's from the early periods because you can't really duplicate Polaroid's very well. And it was quite expensive over the years, taking Polaroid's, because Polaroid's never really did justice to make-up.
GW: Oh really?
JN: Yeah ... So it would give you the outline of the basic continuity, especially for bruises. On MacGyver we used to number his bruises or his dirt patches or whatever.
GW: Oh wow.
Newman tries to keep Christopher Judge's head straight as she applies his tattoo. | |
JN: Oh yeah. This is a "number five" bruise here. This is a "number two" dirt spot here.
GW: Two inches wide, the other one is, like, half an inch.
JN: That's for sure. But I never quite knew what happened to them. But, if they are being sold for charity, I think that's great. We put together albums. Each episode had its own album.
GW: Two hundred albums.
JN: After the Polaroid thing, each season had one full binder of the cast, not the scripts, but the cast and their pictures. The digital pictures that we did.
GW: Wow.
JN: Also somewhere up there in those archives are the original rock, dental rock molds, some tattoos over the period. They may have already gone. I know some of the tattoos were auctioned off very early while I was still on Stargate. We'd just packaged them up, the gold ones.
GW: Oh, the Jaffa tattoos, yeah.
JN: Yes, the Jaffa tattoos. Then just not too long ago at Comic-Con they wanted some of the back tattoos.
GW: Yeah for fans.
JN: So, with Brigitte Prochaska, [we] managed to track those down.
GW: So were those the ones that you used on set?
JN: M-hmm!
GW: So you guys didn't mark tattoos? They were just little, like, you used the water and transferred them? Transferable?
JN: We would use a make-up that was put on with alcohol and a product that was called Silicolor so that it wouldn't sweat off.
GW: Uh-huh. Yeah, long days.
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"Any[one] who comes to me and says, 'I want to be a make-up artist.' I say, 'Go and volunteer. Do stage, do theater, do face painting.'"
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JN: In the early days we were always repairing the tattoos. But in later years, all these new products came out and we managed to get it down to quite a science. Now in "Children of the Gods," if you remember right at the very beginning of "Children of the Gods," we had tattoos that were for the women. This whole thing changed ...
GW: They were silver for the women.
JN: They were very colored. There was something like rainbow colors and gold or silver. I'm not sure, in the history of Stargate, where that actually went, because after a period of time we only used black tattoos on the women. They never had gold tattoos and they had very specific ... what is the word I am thinking of ... universes had very specific, like for instance the tattoo that Teal'c had for Chulak, the women had those. The children never did. Until the boys became mature. And then Teal'c's son then had the tattoo.
GW: Then got it.
JN: So it was very interesting I think how the history of those tattoos came about because I think after about two seasons we started moving into other realms, with different tattoo designs from other universes.
GW: All the different System Lords had their own design.
JN: Exactly, exactly. Good words. System Lords. I had forgotten about that. [Laughter]
GW: Every bad guy had his own tattoo design for his own slaves.
JN: Yes, yes for sure. But, then it became an interesting thing. Each director, if their script called for it, they would meet with Brad and Robert to determine what the hierarchy would be. Then the designers would come up with several different designs and would go to the producers or the director and then we would come up with either creating the gold ones, which were very specific. We would have to have them sculpted.
The art department was so clever. They used to make the molds out of artists paper, but layers, and then we'd pour -- Dorothy, my assistant, would pour sort of a superglue into it. You know the things they use for hot glue guns?
GW: Because they're embossed. They're layered.
JN: They're different dimensional. So we would do that and then we would cover them with gold leaf, or gold paint, depending. But really the history of the tattoo goes right back to "Children of the Gods" on Christopher.
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