How ‘Mother Mary’ Uses Hair and Makeup to Chart a Pop Star’s Rise and Fall

“Mother Mary” begins with a frankly dazzling display of glamor and fame. The titular character is clad in a Gaga-esque wig and Taylor Swift-coded costume, belting into a mic and surrounded by backup dancers, as a crowd of screaming fans so big that it makes your heart thump with anxiety watch on. She is every bit the perfect pop star: there’s not a pore in sight, nor a hair out of place. Her limbs are long, slender, and wrapped in shiny stockings. She looks practically computer-generated. Like many modern-day beauty icons, she looks unattainable in the way that only people with money can. It’s impossible to envision this gorgeous creature with so much as a blemish, let alone an eye bag, a hangover, or the flu. She could be a God. It’s implied that she’s treated like one.

“It was always clear, of course, that Annie would play the part,” says Heike Merker, the film’s hair and makeup artist. By 'Annie' she’s casually referring to the one and only Anne Hathaway. As an actress who’s so well known, Merker wanted to stray a little from her signature look. Brown hair, then, was mostly off the cards. Instead, Merker wanted to create a new identity: a believable pop star in her own right. 

“I had a conversation with the director [David Lowery] about it first,” Merker tells us. “And Bina Daigeler, the costume designer, was also very important because the costumes were so specific—we couldn’t work separately.” Mother Mary’s costumes are diamond-encrusted and extravagant, and her signature accessory is a saintly halo.

While ideating, Merker researched every corner of the music-sphere: “I went through all kinds of singers you can imagine. I went through so many shows. When they’re on stage, what's the important part of a singer? Like, what do they need? What are they like? I looked in old magazines, even period stuff, Pinterest, the Internet. I didn’t want to pick up something that was already there. I wanted to have something unique.”

Merker notes that it was a bit like preparing for a play. In the end, Mother Mary’s looks were made to be as practical as they were fantastical. “Hair can catch easily on a costume,” she explains. “So you need to try to avoid that. So, how do you prepare the hair so that it's still smooth and not catching? We went for long, straight hair. I used a lot of silicone to keep it as flexible and silky as possible.” By silicone, she’s talking about silicone-rich hair products, which she “burned” into the hair with hot straighteners to seal it all in. 

With practicalities accounted for, Merker needed to create a pop diva identity. “We wanted to tell the story with different hair colors,” Merker recalls. “First of all, with the costume and the halo, Mother Mary is already unique. But then we changed the wigs color-wise; we always had a two-tone wig. So the blonde had a dark hair frame, the red had a blonde frame. This was her sign.”  Merker used wefted wigs throughout the film and, like a modern-day Hannah Montana story, they symbolized Mother Mary’s step into superstardom. 

Her makeup was less distinctive, but glamorous nonetheless. Yet, the wigs took centre stage, leaving her makeup to look somewhat secondary. “We tried to keep a natural, not-overdone kind of stage makeup, because I thought that would be all too much.”

If you think about it, this makes complete sense: when performers are on stage, they wear layers and layers of thick makeup so that far-away fans can see it under harsh lights. In the film, Merker needed to worry about the camera getting up-close and personal, not people in a crowd.

Yet, she didn’t shy away from glitz: “We had glitter in, we had golden liners in, we had gloss, of course. And then the lip colors changed in different tones [according to her] dress.” Her gold eyeliner posed a surprising problem: no gold liners looked truly gold on camera; they all looked green. Finally, Merker settled on an old and sadly discontinued Armani formula.

After the film introduces Mother Mary as such a glittering pop icon, seeing her as a real, flawed person gives the audience major whiplash. She steps into the modern day soaked from the rain. Her hair is wavy and short – an instant visual contrast to her onstage wigs, which are butt-long and pin-straight – and her blonde is woven with overgrown black streaks (note it’s still two-toned, like her onstage persona). Her under-eyes look dark and shadowy, like she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks, and her eyes and skin are laid bare. Mother Mary has been peeled back to reveal a – shock horror – human within.

“It was kind of like a sad feeling,” says Merker of the look. “Like she’s not there.” Keeping a two-toned hair color was a purposeful choice, made to make Hathaway seem like she’s trying to be her big, Mother Mary self, but not quite making it.

The problem was that Hathaway herself looked too good: “Whenever I see her, she always looks perfect. She’s beautiful. Her skin is amazing, her hair is amazing. Her dark hair is definitely right for her.” 

For her humanized scenes, then, Merker was tasked with making Hathaway look more… like us. In the end, she felt like the rooted blonde was a “believable look for her character”.

After getting caught in the rain (this part of the film is set in England, after all), Mother Mary’s wet hair makes her look shrew-like. Her eyes look bigger and more innocent without all of that wig to contend with, and there’s something about the wet look that makes her seem vulnerable and exposed. It’s unsurprising that Lowery decided to keep it throughout the entire film.

“It was not written in the script that she constantly had wet hair,” says Merker. “I wet it down to show [Lowery] how it looks, and then he was like, ‘You know what? I think I would love to have her [look like this] all the way through.’” 

Hathaway’s hair here is also a wig, not “wet wet,” but not quite dry either. “It was a wonderful look,” muses Merker. “It had a kind of stringy feeling.” For this, she mixed her own cocktail of leave-in conditioners, olive oil, argan oil and water, which made the wig look wet even while it was dry, saving Merker from having to spritz Hathaway down with water between takes. In another scene, while Hathaway emerges from a bath with sopping-wet hair, Merker used ultrasound gel from the pharmacy to make it look extra saturated.

Wetness aside, Mother Mary as a regular human looked makeup-free. “The makeup was very, very, very basic,” confirms Merker. She evened out Hathaway’s skin with a dash of Westman Atelier (“It looks like nothing, basically, but there is makeup on”) and subtly pencilled her already-brown brows.

Ultimately, Merker split Mother Mary in two. After dolling her up, she tore her down. “She’s not her. She’s not at her peak anymore.” She fell, she says, and this broke her “to make her like everyone else.”