Making a TV show about a flesh-eating zombie offers its technical challenges — like how to fake various (edible) human limbs and other body parts.
That becomes even more complicated when your star is a vegetarian.
In the new Netflix comedy “Santa Clarita Diet” (which premiered Friday), Drew Barrymore plays Sheila Hammond — a suburban LA mom and realtor complacent in her marriage to husband Joel (Timothy Olyphant) — who upends her family’s life when she becomes a member of the undead and develops a taste for other humans. The job of making Barrymore (who doesn’t eat meat) into a convincing zombie fell to prosthetic makeup effects designer Christien Tinsley.
“There were so many things you couldn’t use. I would have said let’s get some raw tuna, sushi-grade, and bloody it up and make life easy and it didn’t work that way,” Tinsley tells The Post.
“We ended up defaulting to gummy bear formula. It’s gelatinous, it’s translucent, we can cast it into food-grade molds we created to look like meat and visceral tendon, and we could paint them with food dyes.”
Tinsley (who’s previously worked on shows like “Westworld” and “American Horror Story”) and a team of four artists from his Tinsley Studio were tasked with creating consumable versions of everything from raw chicken legs to a cadaver foot to prosthetic fingers that could be bitten off an actor’s hand. Other cannibal meals fell to the props department. The raw ground meat Sheila snacks on? Ground pasta colored with food dye. The bloody shakes she makes by tossing body parts in a Vitamix? A blend of beets and bananas.
Then there was that staple of all gory series — fake blood. Tinsley and his team used several different formulas depending on the effect, including ones that would stay “fresh” on Barrymore’s face for hours of shooting and others for moments that require a more aged, residual effect. “They’re all digestible. Some are just more pleasant on the digestive system than others,” he says.
The fake blood’s main ingredient is water, which is thickened with methyl cellulose (the same ingredient used in jelly doughnut filling), caramel coloring to give the blood a realistic yellow/brown undertone, preservatives to keep the mixture fresh for a few days, and surfactants.
“If you just put water on your skin, the way it rolls across the surface is different, so you have to put things like surfactants in, which are almost like soap, like detergents,” Tinsley says. “They allow a certain slip and feel so the fake blood can glide over surfaces and resemble a real blood.”
The “Santa Clarita Diet” star who got the most screen-time covered in blood was Barrymore — a stark contrast to the actress’ long resume of rom-com roles.
“I remember the first day that we had to work with Drew, she was going to be chewing on some meat and she was going to get bloody — it was going to be on her mouth, it was going to be over her mouth, on her clothes, her hands,” Tinsley says.
So before the scene, he approached Barrymore and her team sensitively, inquiring whether they were any guidelines of trying to avoid ruining the actress’ hair or makeup, but found her surprisingly game to get messy.
“She would actually grab the bottle of blood and squeeze it into her mouth, pour it onto her chin and let it drip down onto her clothes,” he says. “I think she was having a good time not being Drew in the other movies that we’ve seen her in.
“She was Drew the cannibal and I think she was having fun with that.”