Jake Garber is no stranger to Emmy Nominations. For years, his work on The Walking Dead was celebrated by the awards ceremony. Now, his craftsmanship is nominated once again for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for the hit series, Fallout. Garber reunited with Walton Goggins, who he’s worked with on several projects in the past, to create the dynamic Ghoul.
Funny enough, Garber originally passed on the opportunity. “I initially turned it down,” Garber told Immersive.” because I’d gotten a call from James W. Scotchdopole, who’s a producer I’d worked with in the past, and he said, ‘Are you interested in doing this Ghoul makeup for this video game thing?’ I’m not a gamer, so I really didn’t know about it. And I just said, ‘I’m not interested. I had done eight years of Walking Dead and I’m done with that sort of stuff.’ And he said, ‘Well, good, that’s what we’re kind of hoping you’d say.’ They pitched it. Okay, you got me. And once they mentioned they were thinking about getting Walton and I was like, ‘I’m in.'”
With a Frankenstein poster behind him, which he acquired in the fourth or fifth grade, Garber spoke with Immersive about turning Goggins into the Ghoul.
What were your first discussions with Walton about what you both wanted to accomplish with the Ghoul?
I actually wasn’t involved in those conversations initially when I got the call. I wanted to have [prosthetics effects designer] Vincent Van Dyke involved, and Vincent was the guy that designed it based on stuff from the game and discussions with Jonah [Nolan] and Walton. I was brought in more for technical aspects of the makeup. And yes, I was involved briefly in that, but I was trying to make it clear that Vincent was the guy that was the designer and the manufacturer of the prosthetics for that one.
It was definitely brought up that they didn’t want to have that character be gruesome or off-putting. Matter of fact, after everything had aired, there seemed to be a bit of a group of, I think, women primarily that had said that he was quite desirable. He was on “the list.” Jonah had sent an email to me and Vince, and I don’t even think he put anything in the body of it, but he just put in the caption that the thing was there. It was a mission accomplished.
Let’s start with the Ghoul’s eye sockets. They are deep. What trial and error was required there?
Well, the eyes were the only thing that was really him. There was a discussion early on about potentially using contact lenses, but Walton was not keen on it. I don’t know if anybody really was. I think they were probably more looking at it as what they had in the video game. As far as the sockets go, one of the biggest things, which I learned this a bit on Walking Dead, we used to just darken the eyes so much that they become these dark sockets.
Matter of fact, if you look at it, the blending edge on there was a bit lower than his lower lash line. I deliberately avoided putting makeup right there. It actually made his eyes pop a little bit more than just all of a sudden having a deep set of eyes in there. I guess one of the things that I’ve seen in the past and currently as well, sometimes when people are doing something along the lines of somebody that’s undead or a zombie, they really go with this solid color around eyes. It ends up, in my opinion, looking something like the Old Little Rascals gag where somebody had put charcoal on the eyepiece and put it to their eyes. It just becomes this dark, dark circle around their eyes.
Your first experience working with Walton, it took about five hours, right? The first attempt?
Anytime you’re doing a makeup test, if you’re lucky enough to have it, and we definitely need it on this show, you come in with no agenda. We’re all patient with it. So it was me, Vincent, and Walton at Vincent’s shop with no pressure. We didn’t have anybody from production there. They kind of wanted to see it, but we said we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to basically debug it and see if there were any issues that we had without the pressure of somebody sitting around. “Well, will it be that color? Will it do this?” Let us do a pass at it. And then once we get our notes out of the way, then we would have them look at a subsequent test that was done. We showed ’em photos of it, obviously, but we didn’t feel the need to have them there.
First tests do take a while. The next test that we did was probably a little bit less, but it was still probably four and a half hours. The first time that I did it solo in New York for a makeup test was maybe about three and a half. Maybe the first couple days was probably around that. And once you’re doing a prosthetic like that, at least for me, you can start figuring out the problems and the shortcuts.
Once you’ve done it maybe about 15, 20 times, you’ve pretty much got it as debugged as you can get. You become quicker with it. I tend to think that it’s a disservice to production, the actor and the makeup artist, to do a makeup that takes five hours. It’s not fair, you know? [Laughs] Doing it on a test is one thing. Or let’s say you’re doing an elaborate full body makeup that maybe plays a handful of times during shooting, fine, you’re going to have to accept those times and that’s it.
But to do something on a daily basis where you’re in the chair for five hours, now you got to go work after that, or they do. We’ve already done our stuff, so there’s another arguably 10 to 12 hours on top of that plus removal. So, it can be really draining. I try to make it as painless as possible for all parties.
Like you said, during that early testing phase or figuring out the problems and the shortcuts for the goal, what were some of those early problems in the shortcuts you figured out?
Some of it was just sort of the repetition of putting the pieces on and seeing, okay, this is where I need to glue it on first. Walton was kind of saying, “Hey, can we go without this thing?” The first thing that would go on would be a bald cap. There were some little things that we would do to help it secure behind the ear. I wanted to have that there, because the first half of the filming was in hot weather on the east coast, so I really wanted to get that thing secure.
And if we knew there was a day where it was like, okay, maybe he’s not going to be in it quite so long, we might try a shortcut to see how it lasted or if it was worth continuing with. Honestly, when I did the bald cap initially, this was underneath the entire nine pieces. There are certain types of glues that you can put on there. Won’t bore you with the details of it.
Please do.
Well, there’s basically three types prosthetics, but one of ’em is a silicone based adhesive, which is clear. It’s a brand name would be something like telesis. And another one is an acrylic based one, which is something called Pros-aide, which is essentially glorified Elmer’s glue, but it looks like milk and the other one is clear. Now the Pro has got, they all have their perks, but the Pros-aide, if it’s on there and it starts to get really hot and he starts to sweat under that thing, it’ll basically reactivate it and all of a sudden, like milk, will start to flow out of it. And as hot as it was the first couple days, all of a sudden it looked like Walton had milk coming out the corner of his eyes.
So I actually didn’t glue down the bald cap underneath all that stuff. I got everything glued around the side and the back, which was not a problem. If it drained or leaked out of there, it was under the wardrobe and it wasn’t a problem. So for the forehead, what I ended up doing was used this stuff called Opsite, which is a medical tape. I had the bald cap was down and just put that over the whole front strip right there. It minimized the amount of sweat coming out and I didn’t have to deal with any sort of milky tears leaking out of it. And I was using a mix of both of ’em. I was using some telesis and Pros-aide on certain areas, but, but that eliminated one of the issues right there.
What about the goal’s neck? What was some trial and error there?
Well, actually the first one neck that was sculpted Jonah wanted some structural changes done on the thing, so that ended up getting re-sculpted. It was minor, minor issues. I think it mainly had to do with some wrinkle patterns that were on there that he thought might be a little bit repetitive or something like that. They both look good, but Jonah said, “Let’s try this one.”
With Vincent, we were always having discussions about having the prosthetics as thin as humanly possible so the emotions can come out and Walton’s movements can translate appropriately through the piece. So the neck, all the pieces were quite thin. I think the thickest area on any of ’em might’ve just been the cheekbones actually. But the neck one, we did a few passes at it. Matter of fact, Vincent has just started running new stuff for season two. I won’t bore you with the tech talk.
The core had to get shaved down a little bit so it wasn’t quite so thin if it did rip since they were silicone pieces, the silicone is essentially the centerpiece and then there’s something called encapsulant, which goes on the outside of it. And it was so thin in certain areas that there was no actual silicone there. It was just encapsulant, which is a sealer basically, if that happened to rip or sweat through or dissolve or whatever, there was really no repairing it at that point. We had to try to get that silicone and just shave it down. So we had a little bit of silicone there, so we had some structure.
What was the tech talk you and Vincent just had about it?
Oh, once we got rolling last year, there was no reversing or anything like that. There were a couple spots on the neck where, if you’ve got neck cords or the esophagus is prominent or something like that, you’ll have areas in there that tended to be quite thin. It was to the point where I would reinforce them on the backside of the piece with the same stuff that I was doing on the bald cap up front, which was the Opsite. So I would glue that on the backside and it didn’t affect the flexibility or the adhesion or anything for the piece. And I just said, “Let’s see if we can shave a couple of those areas down just a little bit more.” It’s one less step for me to do during the prep process.
All this stuff would be done before Walton would be in the chair. So I would have a number of sets, but there were nine sets of prosthetics for that particular look. And I would pre-paint all of those to about a 90% mark on there. Once everything was glued onto ’em, all I had to do was kind of connect the dots and tie it together right there, do some final detail work, and some painting to make it more cohesive and all that.
All of the stuff, like putting the upside on the backside of the piece, the pre-painting of the pieces, the subsequent ceiling of the pieces, it doesn’t tend to rub off quite so much and all that. All that’s done before Walton would get in the chair. And I think the quickest I ever got it on might’ve been maybe an hour and a half, hour 45.
About two hours was pretty was a good time and that’s a good time too, because he could be in the chair for about an hour, we take a break for a little bit, come back. Walton always brought in his laptop and he’d pick a Western or some such to watch during the process. So everybody was asking me, “Oh, what were you guys watching today?” I said, “I wasn’t watching anything. I was working. I was listening to it. Walton was the one that was watching the movies.” A lot of old time type western stuff.
How do you put an actor at ease when they’re nervous? How do you try to support them?
Liquor, alcohol, something like that [Laughs]. Walton had some very reasonable concerns, because this is the first time where he really was playing a character for a better part of this series under full prosthetics. He was concerned that what he was giving was being received on the other end was his acting, what he wanted to have presented out there.
The best I could say to him was like, “I see it, I’m okay with it.” Not that it was an insecurity thing, it was a new experience for him. I mean, he would sit there and look in the mirror to see how his face would move and the like. And then finally, once he did start seeing some stuff, I mean this was after we were filming, he contacted me and said, “Okay, I see what you were saying. I’m good. Everything seemed to work fine.”
When you look back at your season one experience, what are you most proud of or what did you find the most creatively fulfilling about the experience?
That’s a good one. Honestly, I think it was just getting it done. It was a tough project and very difficult. There were some people on the show that had not worked on episodic before, and I had, and a lot of people were just not used to that sort of pace. It can really take it out of you. You really, really do have to pace yourself on a show that runs that long a time right there. But I was pleased with the results. I was happy with the final look.
I know initially Jonah kept talking about having his skin look more like leather, which I understood what he was going after. But leather, when you look at it for the most part, doesn’t have a whole lot of variety of color in there. And that’s the thing with prosthetics is, you want to be able to add variances in there to make it look more organic.
If we just did something that was to look like a catcher’s mitt or something like that, I think it would’ve been a very flat looking makeup. It probably wouldn’t have lent itself that well to it. But I was pleased we found a good, happy medium on all that stuff. I was pleased to get it done. I didn’t get fired, so I was good with that.
Fallout is available to stream on Prime.
