“All we had to do was place them right every day, and Bob’s your uncle: You have Pam there in seconds.”
— JASON COLLINS, Autonomous F/X, speaking of Lily James’ eyebrow prosthetics
The eight-part Hulu series Pam and Tommy centers on the infamous saga of Pamela Anderson’s and Tommy Lee’s stolen sex tape in the mid-90’s.
It was once a story ripe with ridicule and wackiness. And some of that gleefully persists. But now a more sympathetic reassessment emerges with all the nostalgia cues perfected down to every tattoo and suntanned body part.
The creative hair, makeup, and prosthetics team had their work cut out for them. And so did the actors with three-plus hours of full-body transformation each day. “It’s tough because you don’t want to go into caricature on these things,” says Jason Collins of Autonomous F/X. Realism is the goal, and the shared directive was to tap into an essence that, when adapted to each actor, registered as emotionally true.
In Vanity Fair’s article How Pam & Tommy’s Lily James and Sebastian Stan Transformed Into 1990s Icons Laura Regensdorf details the mix of silicone, prosthetic foreheads, breasts, nipples , penises (both talking and mute), wigs, make-up, tattoos, dentures and eyebrows that went into transforming Lily James and Sebastian Stan into two entirely different people, aka Pam and Tommy.
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