Jennifer "JQ" Quinteros discusses behind the scenes of Hulu's Hold Your Breath
Jennifer "JQ" Quinteros is a special effects make-up artist who has made a name for herself in films such as X-Men: First Class and Hulu's Hold Your Breath. Hold Your Breath stars Sarah Paulson and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. JQ's role in creating make-up looks for characters is not only inspired by the circumstances of the narrative but also by her background as a medical student. JQ has plenty of experience working on shows and movies, such as her previous work, Hulu's Kindred, and FX's Snowfall. However, JQ also teases what is to come from her work on Opus.
Culturess: How did you become interested in being a special effects make-up artist?
JQ: I actually became interested in it, I was Pre-Med, so I didn't have any interest in working in the film industry. I had always done make-up for theatre, but it wasn't until I did see Bram Stoker's Dracula when I was little, but it wasn't until I saw it as an adult that I realized Gary Oldman was playing all of those roles. I had no idea he was playing the human role, Dracula, the werewolf, I was blown away at that fact actually. I was kind of sad that it was the first time I had ever noticed that was as an adult. But once I realized that one actor was in all of those make-ups and what a beautiful performance he had, whatever you think about the film doesn't matter, Gary nailed it when it came to creating those creatures, and after I saw that, I was like, 'Wow, I wanna do that. That's amazing.' Everything from the period mustaches and making the period make-up look good to full-on prosthetics and creature suits. I was like, 'Okay, I didn't realize that I could work with somebody who's in all those things, all those make-ups.' So that is definitely what got me interested in special effects make-up, Bram Stoker's Dracula 1992.
Culturess: How did you get involved with working on Hulu's Hold Your Breath?
JQ: So the producers of Hold Your Breath, who also happen to be a group of powerhouse women, I had worked with two of them before several times throughout my career in L.A., and when they realized the scale of what was going to be needed from the make-up department, for example two dead bodies that were likeness make-ups of our actors, they called me probably about a year before filming to ask what it takes to get these bodies made and how much that costs, because they were going to pitch a budget. So I connected them to the three biggest labs that did the most beautiful work, special make-up effects labs, so they could get honest estimates of how much time, and then I didn't hear from them again for nine months, which was fine. I was like, 'Consulting, I'm here for you, buddy.' That's totally cool. But then they called back, and they were just like, 'Hey, guess what? We got green-lit on our budget, and we would love for you to Department Head, but we have a proposition for you. We want you to Department Head both the regular beauty and the special effects, and we'd like for you to consider a Co-Department Head to help you with all the rest of the things but we want you to design the movie.' To a make-up artist, if you know anything about film and television, a lot of the times the make-up departments are separate. You have make-up department, and you have special effects make-up, and they each have Department Heads, and so this was an opportunity to have control and creative design over everything that came to the looks of the movie. So, I was like, 'Heck yes, of course I will.' and they were like, 'Great, we're shooting in New Mexico,' and I was like, 'Okay, I've done that a lot. That's hard. We're gonna have to get to work right now.' It was honestly the amazing women behind the film that put my name out there to the studio, the studio had to approve me and put my name out there to Sarah because Sarah is an executive producer, and if you know Sarah Paulson, she's worked with every amazing make-up artist ever, especially when it comes to special effects and horror. So, they had to pitch me to Sarah as well, and she approved, so it was like after all three approved of me, I got the job, and I was stoked because it was one of my favorite jobs I've ever had in my life for sure.
Culturess: What was it like to work with an all female team?
JQ: Oh, it was like being home. I'm not one to, like of course I'm full female power, I'm a queer artist, of course I want women in the room. But, I'm not one who's like, 'Oh, I want this to be all female, or let's throw some boys in the mix.' I thought it was just an actual delight when I started calling Sarah, called her personal hair stylist, Michelle, because knowing Michelle's work, which is stunning, and knowing that Sarah was going to be wearing wigs for this, I had to figure out how to not ruin the lace of the wigs, and I wanted to know how to do that early with Michelle so I called everybody early and they were the ones on the phone that were pleasantly surprised that Sarah was going to have an all-female team, and it just happened to be an all queer female team, which was the coolest to me, of course, I'm biased. But it was awesome. That was a group of alphas, and if you know anything about me, I am an alpha who really loves alphas. So, I don't lose myself in a room of alphas, and I don't expect to command a room of alphas. I get excited about the collaboration. So, from her movement and dialogue coach to her assistant to her hair to her make-up, not costume, but that's okay, we were all queer females, and it was really sweet to be on such a hard film and have an inside dialogue. It was really great, too; if you give women in power the space to execute what they need to do, it's amazing what they're capable of, or what we're capable of, I should say. So, it's like respecting everybody's process and what they needed to do in this group of women was so easy, and it created really amazing results. I really enjoyed the women that were around her. I really enjoyed Sarah. I brought women from my team to the table so that they could be part of it, and it just ended up being just a really cool, accidentally all-female group. I can't speak for anybody else but I had a great time for sure. She has some great people around her. She, herself, is very grounded, and so it's really easy when somebody works that hard and is that grounded to come into the mix if you, too, function that way and just hit the ground running, and it's awesome. It was great.
Culturess: Why do you consider LGBTQIA+ representation important in media?
JQ: I think LGBTQIA+ representation is important everywhere. It doesn't matter where. I think it should be in the Church. I think it should be at work. I think it should be at school because we are not different because we're gay. So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, duh, natural fit. If you want to joke about it, queers rule the industry, but I really don't see myself as being any different or separated from anybody else as being a queer woman except for the laws that keep getting passed against us. So, even if it's in your religion to not support that, that's fine, that's your religion, but when it comes to the government, the U.S., our industry, there shouldn't be any reason that LGBTQIA+ people aren't in the room and aren't involved. Sarah is very much a queer icon, but she doesn't try to be, it's not how she promotes herself; she doesn't speak about it that way; she just embodies that, and our queer community loves and upholds her as a queer Goddess and a queer icon.
My mission when it comes to representation in the room is equity, not equality, equity. There's a big difference in the two. Equality should be given. But equity is like, 'No, I'm not any different. Anybody who's queer is not any different, shouldn't be making any less, shouldn't not be invited because we are queer. I am exactly the same as you, and if I presented as straight, you would have zero issues with who I am as a person, so who I love has nothing to do with how I can execute a make-up or how I can build a business.' So it's just one of those things where it comes to our industry, when it comes to queer, when it comes to women, I don't see myself as any different or less empowered, and I hope that people who are afraid to be themselves and are afraid to be queer in the room, I've been afraid to be queer in the room. That was a huge experience for me as a make-up artist. It can be scary when women allow themselves to be in a certain state of undress in front of you if you think that they should know that you're into women. It's a scary space. So, do I tell them? Don't I tell them? Is this important? Isn't this important? I'm done living that life, and I don't want anybody else to have to feel that. I'm not gonna be able to change that based on a person-by-person experience, but if I just exist the way that I exist, I walk into a room like I deserve to be there just as much as anybody else does, I hope that all the baby queers of the world can see that. All the late queers of the world who have been afraid to come out for fifty years can see that and be just a little bit less afraid. That's what makes it so important. Have no fear because you're queer is just my thing, like no, that's not gonna be the reason I'm afraid. There's going to be ten thousand other reasons I might be afraid of the room, but it's not because I'm gay. Period. Full-stop.
Culturess: What makes being a special effects make-up artist unique?
JQ: There's nothing unique about being a special effects make-up artist. There's so many of us in the world, and we're really talented human beings, man are there a lot of talented special effects make-up artists. I think what makes it different, not special, and I have to say this because when you walk onto a set, and I know this from experience being the Make-Up Department Head, it's like, yeah, that's fine. If you walk on the set as the Special Effects Make-Up Department Head, you're kind of like a mini rockstar, 'Oh, what you do is so cool.' But what they don't realize is somebody like me, who does everything from red carpet make-up to Department Head of Special Effects for a feature film, beauty is just as hard, if not harder. There's not anything to hide behind sometimes when it comes to beauty. I could put prosthetics all over your face and get the results I want or all over your body and get the results I want because I've just manipulated your entire shape. But when it comes to beauty, there's only so much you can do. I'm not a plastic surgeon. I'm not a magician. So, it's like, to me, both of them are so powerful, they're so important, that I don't think special effects make-up is different. I just think it's rad. I just think it's cool. I just think if that's how your brain works, it really gives you the ability to do other things differently. So, my beauty approach is really shaped from my special effects make-up. I started off more comfortable with special effects make-up. I was way less comfortable with beauty make-up when I started because you can't hide. So, I think what makes it awesome is that I could turn you into a forty-year-old black man if I wanted to. That's awesome. I'm not going to, but I can, and that's what makes it really cool, whereas with other parts of make-up, you have limitations or some argue that you don't, but I think special effects and beauty are both really, again, equitable, both really important. I really want to stress that as somebody who does both really in-depth. I want to stress that they're both really hard to do, and they're both amazing when you start to do them well.
Culturess: How has your background as a former medical student influenced your work?
JQ: I mean severely. I am not down with things that aren't real. I'm not your fantasy girl at all. I don't like aliens. I don't like to imagine creatures sometimes, execute them sure if there's a Department Head who wants me to execute an alien for The Orville like Howard Berger does, like sure yes absolutely I'll do an alien for you. But I don't find joy in the unreal. I find huge joy in realism. My background in the medical world really helped me understand how the body works, and it really helped me understand what causes visual realism because a lot of real injuries look very fake. So, I know if I create something that looks exactly like the real thing, it might look really fake on camera. So you have to do that movie magic, adjust things, and make things that maybe they're not the most realistic, but they're based off the most realistic aspect of that, and then you move from there. But, as far as my medical background has been invaluable. I have been able to explain to Karrie and Will on Hold Your Breath what happens when a shotgun blast to the face is that close, what happens to the skull, what happens to the eyes. People forget that a blast that big actually makes your eyes pop out of your skull, depending on the angle. So, it's like if your skull is half blown away, people think, oh just the half blown away, no, this whole thing has happened on the other side of the inside of your skull, and the pressure has forced everything out. So oftentimes, there will be a weird misshaping of the ear and jaw on the other side. The other eye will be protruding out and those are things that I needed to explain to the filmmakers. Like this stage of bed soars would look like this. I went to both the filmmakers, Will and Karrie, and sometimes Sarah, she had to ask me to stop. In the production meetings, I had to come with disclaimers, but because of my background, I have all these medical journals and archives, so I'm able to show real photos of these real injuries to filmmakers as we were making the film. They don't always like it, but I help them understand what their movie can look like and where they might want me to pull back, and the same goes for the lab. Autonomous was my make-up lab that I hired for the show. Jason Collins is the head of that lab. He is a highly awarded and skilled special effects make-up artist and Department Head, and he supported me as a Department Head through all of this. Giving him real medical photos of the injuries for the prosthetics I wanted, he was like, 'Where are you getting these from? This is disgusting.' slash awesome. So it's helped me greatly to drive in what something would look like and how a filmmaker can steal moments of someone bleeding out, someone being crushed. What are the dramatic moments that can happen in that time that would be realistic? So a lot of my medical background came to Hold Your Breath. Just the timing, infections, asphyxiation. What does that look like? It's helped me greatly in my career. It really helps me have a dialogue and then a visual for anybody who might not understand how severe, or not severe, something can be when it comes to the body.
Culturess: How did you come up with the make-up looks for each individual character?
JQ: So that was driven by the world, the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. If you look at any of the photographs, no matter how hard people tried, they all looked like hell. They were kind of living in a version of Hell on Earth with no food and water, without all this dust and all these storms, and the one thing that I know about wind because I've experienced it myself, we actually experienced on this film is that wind is maddening. It does make people crazy. It really does irritate you and all of us, the entire crew at one point in time, had moments of madness. We were like, 'Jesus, this wind,' or 'This dust is everywhere,' and we could really relate to the characters. So, the looks got created by the environment. Each character has their own environment. Margaret, Sarah's character, is doing the best at keeping her family as dust-free and clean as possible, but at what cost, and that starts to show on her body. The cost of this obsession with trying to keep your world "normal" in an abnormal situation. Esther, our character Esther, poor thing. Her husband is dead, she is living in a shack with her children, her young teenage son is the only man of the house keeping things going, and she is suffering from grief. So she's not able to take care of her children well. She's not able to take care of herself well. That is reflected in the make-ups, and the hair, and the costume. All of that got dominated by the environment. When it came to Margaret, Sarah absolutely had ideas for that, of course she did, and they were great ideas, and we got to keep some of them, and we had to get rid of other ones. But, Sarah had really thought about it in the same way that we had.
When it came to Ebon's character, one of our antagonists, his look is definitely, and his look was my favorite look of the entire film, and nobody talks about it yet. But he was the one look that the studio came back with and was like, 'Dude, who did this make-up? He looks great. He looks like such an opposite character from Margaret.' and that was because he's a grifter. So, the man's been in brawls so I put some old scars on him, the man has been traveling, he's tattered, he's full of dirt, and he's shifty. That comes from Ebon, and Ebon and I really bonded slowly through his make-up and creating his character because he had ideas, but until we married our ideas together and he allowed me to execute them on his face, which he had never been in the make-up chair that long before. It was about a thirty-minute application, thirty-five, they're usually like, 'Yeah, you're good Ebon. Go to set.' and I was like, 'No Ebon, come here. I have to scar you. I have to make you dirty. I gotta make your teeth disgusting. Your nails have to be trash. You're a trashy character.' He doesn't necessarily care about cleanliness, and he wants to look like a worker. So, as much as I want to take credit for creating these characters, it's really the environment and the story that led to that, and I was just a good little soldier. I was like, 'Okay, you live here and your life sucks.' And of course, looking at the research and the photos, they're all in black and white, so you really have to break that down. But the people were having a hard time, and the letters from that time, I read a ton of diaries and letters that were given to me by the director and so it really helped me shape people's descriptions of what it felt like on their skin, on their eyelashes, on their hair, how annoying dust for years, dust and wind for years. So, I really wanted to create a sense of low-key suffering and, in some characters, the path to madness. One of my favorite lines is "Rats in the attic" in this movie, it's because people start to lose their mind, they've got rats in the attic and I wanted that to reflect in the make-up because definitely the crew were also losing their minds. We ended up looking like the people in the Dust Bowl by the end of the movie.
Culturess: What can you tease about future projects?
JQ: Oh my God, I'm so excited for Opus. Opus is coming out. It has Ayo Edebiri from The Bear. She's the lead. John Malkovich is also a lead in the film and it too is a psychological thriller, horror, whatever you want to call it. High concept feature from A24 Films, and a first-time director, just like Will and Karrie were first-time directors. I love first-time directors because I love being one of the people that helps create their very first vision come to life, and I really hope to set my bar high for them so that they have a blissful experience. I was first-time directors to have an almost blissful experience because it's so hard. But Marc Anthony Green directed Opus, and I gotta say it's so weird. It is so weird. John Malkovich was brilliant. Juliette Lewis is in it. She's brilliant. Steph Shep, it's her first feature. Steph comes from the Kardashian world. It was so fun, and that movie is twisted. It's just mentally twisted, and I'm really excited about it. We finished the pick-ups for it just last month, and I'm really hoping that it will premiere next year for our spooky season in October, just like this one, because I'm really excited about that film, too. That was also a situation where I Department Headed the beauty and the effects, and I think it's going to be fun. I think you guys might like it.
Check out Hold Your Breath on Hulu on Thursday, October 3, 2024.
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