For Blitz Bazawule‘s film “The Color Purple,” makeup department head Carol Rasheed was tasked with creating realistic looks for Black characters in the South spanning four decades. “In the early 1900s it kind of varied,” she says of women’s makeup. “You have somebody like Shug back in that time wearing reds, and that was considered to be a loose woman. I had to think about that and bringing it up to a current situation with the re-imagined ‘Color Purple.'” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Rasheed’s work began with a focus on the four main characters: Celie (Fantasia Barrino), Shug (Taraji P. Henson), Sofia (Danielle Brooks) and Mister (Colman Domingo). “I went through so many iterations of lip colors, just mixing and trying to get the right shade of red for Celie. My goal was to make sure all the women in the movie had a different shade of red. No two women had on the same red.” For Celie specifically, “It gave her confidence. It gave her a spirit of feeling better about who she was and it really empowered her.”
SEE Taraji P. Henson (‘The Color Purple’): Shug Avery ‘was the voice for women who didn’t have a voice’
“One of the thing that Blitz was very clear to me on was that he wanted our skin to age like Black skin ages,” Rasheed recalls. “It’s not dramatic. The aging on the characters was subtle. That was important. He wanted to really mimic how most melanated people age.”
One of the major issues Rasheed had on set was concealing all of the actors’ tattoos, which were not realistic to the early 1900s. “On this film there were hundreds of tattoos,” she explains. “We had to really grapple with figuring out how to effectively cover hundreds of tattoos, daily. Needless to say, I came up with a great game plan for that. You didn’t have tattoos back in the day, you didn’t have nose piercings and some people didn’t hardly have ear piercings. Those are also part of the research and planning. How are we going to effectively make sure all those things were concealed?”
“The Color Purple” is a decades-spanning tale of love and resilience and of one woman’s journey to independence. Celie faces many hardships in her life, but ultimately finds extraordinary strength and hope in the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood. The Warner Bros. film opens nationwide on December 25.
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