Sarah Sherman and SNL’s makeup head breakdown horrific “Googly Eyes” sketch
We all appreciate the level of body horror that Sarah Sherman (née Squirm) has brought to Studio 8H. Immune to much of the criticism surrounding Saturday Night Live, Sherman has carved out a niche for herself, bolstering the work of longtime Emmy-winning makeup department head Louie Zakarian to give her sketches a bit of terrifying originality. Having worked on SNL for 30 years, making devil costumes, Trump wigs, and Coneheads, Zakarian made one of Sherman's early jugs of nightmare fuel, the googly eye-based sketch, "Eyes," a horrible reality in 2022. Today, at New York Comic-Con, Zakarian and Sherman revealed that one of the most challenging parts with googly eyes, like all eyewear, is seeing out of them and keeping them from fogging.
For those who haven't seen the sketch, Sherman plays a Denver tourism marketer who uses a pitch-meeting regarding Denver's tagline to reveal her tastefully done googly eyes. Sherman pouts and complains that no one has complimented her googly eyes, eventually revealing that she hasn't correctly stored her regular eyes, which are supposed to be refrigerated but are in Sherman's pockets. Her new eyes might smell fine, but seeing through them was a different story.
"Finding those big googly eyes was pretty easy, but trying to figure out how [Sarah] is going to see through the big eyes, read cue cards, and match it all to your skin was the hard part," Zakarian said. "I took the googly eyes, drilled one big hole in the back and a smaller one in the pupil part, but it was dark enough that you couldn't see that there was a hole there."
But drilling a pinhole for Sherman to peek through didn't solve the other problem: Body heat. Every time Sherman moved, the eyes began to fog up. To fix the problem, Zakarian took a lesson from a population well acquainted with foggy eyewear: Glasses wearers. Zakarian said he used a mysterious liquid during the pandemic to prevent his specs from fogging. As the bespectacled masses smack their foreheads and wonder why no one told them such a thing exists, SNL used it to keep those googly eyes from fogging.
"This was COVID times, so I used a bit of liquid on my glasses with my mask to make sure it didn't fog up," Zakarian said. "I used that liquid on the googly eyes."
Of course, since this is Saturday Night Live and planning runs contrary to the show's ethos, all that was discovered in dress rehearsal, meaning Zakarian only had a few minutes to fix it. Zakarian said that prosthetics regularly spawn this kind of problem. "The biggest problem solving that happens between dress and air is that they don't want a prosthetic, and then during dress, something isn't working, and they're like, 'Can we get a prosthetic?'"
Zakarian claims this was the case with a recent Martin Short sketch in which the comedian played Tony Bennett's brother. We can only assume that Short's Tony Bennett's brother's mask is buried under 30 Rock, being watched over by top men. At least that's the picture Zakarian paints of SNL's "severed head" mausoleum.
"We have a lot of severed heads, a lot of body parts, you name it," Zakarian said. "A lot of Coneheads, a lot of devil makeup, all of [Sherman's] stuff is in there. We've got the original Conehead mold, like the Dan Aykroyd Conehead mold. It's a white plaster mold, nothing really fancy to it."
That's right. Top men.