3D Printers and a Wig Archive Help the ‘SNL’ Hair and Makeup Team Go Wilder Than Ever

The turnaround on “Saturday Night Live” is famously brutal. Technically, the production staff have Sunday and Monday off, but… do they really? The costume, hair, and makeup teams all need to hit the ground running on Tuesday when the show’s host comes in for their fitting. Through script read-throughs and rehearsals, the Friday pre-taped segments, and last-minute changes on the day of, the work runs right up until the moment each episode wraps. 

However, that doesn’t mean that “SNL” departments haven’t found ways to do more, and more ambitious work on the NBC show’s maxed-out treadmill of a schedule. Both deep experience and new technology have allowed “SNL” to come up with anything from an army of bobs to ChatGPTio to as many orcs as can fit on the stage at Studio 8H. 

The makeup team has been led by Louie Zakarian and the hair team by Jodi Mancuso for multiple decades now. “If they have me back next year, it will be 26 years,” Mancuso told IndieWire, adding jokingly that, “Louie’s been there since he was born.” 

“With this year, I finished my 31st season department heading, and next season, if we come back, it’ll be 32. It seems like yesterday that we all started there,” Zakarian told IndieWire. 

But in the past couple of years, Zakarian and Mancuso have been able to really step up the ambition of what “SNL” can do over the course of the week, and especially what they can do over the course of a couple of days. If, say, an updated Weekend Update sketch now includes Dobby the House Elf, for which Bowen Yang would need a full face prosthetic as well as prosthetic gloves, that truly may have meant pulling an all-nighter and an all-dayer after that. 

But Zakarian and the makeup team now have a 3D printer and a wealth of digital information, which makes the sculpting and molding process go much faster. “Thank goodness I was able to sculpt it digitally. I had Bowen’s hands on file already, because we’ve done hands for him before. So I was able to sculpt it digitally, throw them on the printers, go to the hotel for a few hours of sleep, come back in the morning, and the molds were printed and ready to go, and we could fill them up with silicone and paint them and have it ready for the show.” 

Part of onboarding each “SNL” host now is doing a face scan so that Zakarian can print any kind of prosthetics or facial hair, as soon as the team knows they need it. Likewise, the information helps Mancuso tailor wigs on what is sometimes very short notice, and the two departments collaborate incredibly closely to, say, transform Bad Bunny into a chatbot companion (of sorts).

“When Benito hosted this year, with [the ChatGPTio sketch], he not only had the receding hairline and the wig, but then we also made a little potbelly for him,” Zakarian said. “We made a little silicon belly that would go on a T-shirt, and as soon as he saw that, he was sporting that thing. He was enjoying it.” 

The hosts enjoy the looks, but Mancuso and the hair team have to be very disciplined about tracking what wigs they have at their disposal, buying or changing what they need quickly, and how much they can dare to store in what is, after all, still an office building — even though “SNL” has converted a couple of floors of Rockefeller Center for their use. If the hair team were actually able to keep everything they make across seasons, they’d need a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” amount of storage. 

“I have an archive of stock wigs, and we try to keep everything. It could be a character from a cast member that hasn’t been there in 25 years, and you’re like, ‘All right, I need to use this wig,’ and I’ll cut it or something for another host last-minute, in the middle of a Friday pre-tape. And without fail, that thing will come back next year or next week,” Mancuso said of the dilemma of reusing wigs. 

“It’s like they know that we’ve done that,” Zakarian joked. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I think they just got rid of something. Quick, write that in.’” 

Mancuso rolls with the changes by trying to make sure she always knows exactly what she has among the over 3,000 wigs at “SNL” and exactly what it would take to make what the writers want. Especially because what a sketch wants, to be really funny, can sometimes scale. Mancuso went from needing five or six bobs for the Bob Army sketch this season to needing 14 and one for a dog — technically doable, but still a big lift to figure out exactly how to coordinate and build what’s needed.

“I have to build my wigs. We have a wig shop in-house because you can’t call a vendor at 3 a.m. and say, ‘Oh, they’re going to play this crazy character. You have to build this wig on this turnaround.’ We have to do it all ourselves,” Mancuso said. “Everything is a, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if there was a sniffing dog that had a bob?’ And you’re like, ‘Well, I hope that I can find you one.’” 

“SNL” Season 51 is one of the most ambitious seasons yet for the hair and makeup teams, doing really involved pretapes with cadres of orcs and Vikings, involved prosthetic builds, and especially a lot of riffs on iconic-looking IP like Dobby or “Home Alone” that the “SNL” team has to get right. It’s for these cases that both physical and digital archives are key. 

“We have a mold room where I store all my molds, and every year, in the fall when we go back, I go through that mold room, and there’s at least two or three dumpsters full of molds that we shatter and destroy. In the 30-some-odd years I’ve been there, it would be like being in ‘Indiana Jones’ if we kept everything,” Zakarian said. “We digitally scan everything now, though, so in an emergency I can throw the file to the print lab. A  couple of gigabytes on a hard drive is a lot easier to store.”

Storage may have gotten easier, but what’s remained constant is that the “SNL” hair and makeup teams have collaborated so fruitfully for so long. “We understand what each other can do and try to help each other out as much as we can with the time restraints that we have. There’s definitely no ego involved, thank God, because it takes a village to do what we do, and we really all get excited when the other person’s thing looks good,” Mancuso said. 

“It gets crazy, but we love it,” Zakarian agreed. 

“It keeps us young!” Mancuso added. 

Which is not bad at all for “SNL” over 50. 

“Saturday Night Live” airs on NBC.