An actor needs to keep an open mind and have a sense of adventure to work on “American Horror Story.” Creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have assembled a reliable cast of stars (Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett) who must be willing to do anything for their art. Anything.
Last year, Bates, as serial murderer Delphine LaLaurie was buried alive and had her head cut off by a vengeful voodoo queen. This year, “AHS” is subtitled “Freak Show” and Lange plays Elsa Mars, a Marlene Dietrich-like figure — complete with a lilting German accent — whose traveling circus has had some rough times with the rise of television in the early 1950s.
Broadway actress Sarah Paulson is playing two roles — sisters Dot and Bette Tattler — but they share one body. Paulson is acting with a pair of identical animatronic heads that are attached to her shoulder with a harness that she wears under her costumes.
“We did a cyber-scanning of her leaning to the left and to the right and made body casts. Onto these left and right body forms we sculpted left and right heads,” says Justin Raleigh, whose company Fractured FX designed the heads in five weeks. They can blink, move their mouths and look up and down, thanks to two puppeteers who run the heads by radio controls at all times.
“The heads were designed to match her as much as humanly possible,” he says. “If she’s playing Bette’S lines she’s wars the Dot animatronic and vice versa. She does both.”
Raleigh says it takes about 15 minutes for Paulson to get into the harness. “A carbon fiber shoulder harness rides across her back and is harnessed into her vest, carrying the weight through her whole body instead into one shoulder,” he says. “If she had to be glued into, like, a prosthesis, it would take hours.” Camera operators film the Dot and Bette performances separately and blend them together with special effects.
Paulson doesn’t always work with the animatronics, though. “Any time you see both heads together it’s a split-screen effect,” Raleigh says. She can also act as each twin looking at a “digital green, fleshy version of her head.”
The technical precision involved doubling “the amount of shooting time any time she works,” Raleigh adds.
That’s true also for costume designer Lou Eyrich, who won an Emmy this year for her work on the “American Horror Story: Coven” season. She has had to create multiple costumes with wider necklines to accommodate the animatronic heads.
For fitting costumes, Eyrick says, “The special effects team made a bust of Sarah as if she had two heads. Having two heads, though, means that the Tattler twins can only wear the simplest fashions, as befits their past as farm girls.
“She wears an ordinary, square, low neckline,” Eyrich says. “You can’t have any detail at the top and you can’t have any kind of pattern. Every dress she wears is made in triplicate. For any stunts, we have nine dresses.”
Eyrich says that Paulson has her own tent on set “where we change the heads. She’s been quite a trouper. She never complains because she’s so excited to do this.”
Bates, thankfully, gets to keep her head on her shoulders this season but in another bow to vanity, the Oscar winner is playing Ethel Darling, the Amazing Bearded Lady, a performer who has been with Lange’s circus for decades.
The preparation is far less strenuous. The beard is made of yak and human hair and was created for Bates by Victoria Wood. It takes only a half-hour to put on and 10 minutes to take off.
“We put products on her skin afterward,” says makeup artist Eryn Krueger Mekash.
Mekash takes considerably longer to prep Bassett, who plays three-breasted oddity Desiree Dupree. “The breasts take about an hour and half to glue on and 2¹/₂ hours to take off,” she says.