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EXCLUSIVE: “The Wheel Of Time” Costume Designer Sharon Gilham Talks Season 3

As longtime readers of this blog will know, it is my humble opinion that Amazon’s The Wheel Of Time boasts some of the most ambitious and exciting costume design on television: from rainbow-hued Aes Sedai gowns and pantsuits to Aiel desert camouflage, from insect-like Seanchan armor and headdresses to high fantasy bondage gear, every costume is a gamble that pays off in spades. Costume designer Sharon Gilham and her team (pictured below) have played a key role in establishing The Wheel Of Time’s iconic look and feel, and I had the great honor of speaking to her ahead of the series’ third season.

A large group of people (The Wheel Of Time costume department) standing on three levels of a warehouse filled with costumes, all posing for a photo.
The Wheel Of Time season three costume department | Provided by Sharon Gilham

Leith Skilling: What drew you to The Wheel Of Time?

Sharon Gilham: To be honest, I was a bit of a newcomer to the fantasy genre. I hadn’t worked on anything like The Wheel Of Time before, and certainly not on such a huge scale. Not only was it a great challenge in terms of the number of characters and nations to create, but I realized, after my initial meeting with Rafe [Judkins, showrunner] and Marigo [Kehoe, executive producer], that it was going to be an absolutely incredible experience creatively.

Rosamund Pike as Moiraine Damodred, standing on a beach. She has long dark brown hair. She wears a long-sleeved white button-down blouse and a dark blue dress. On her left hand, she wears a gold ring with a large blue gemstone.
Moiraine Damodred | Jan Thijs/Prime Video

LS: Of the costumes you’ve had to try and adapt from page to screen, which has been the most difficult to get to a place where it feels like what the books described but is still practical?

SG: I remember when Rafe first mentioned the Aiel culture to me partway through shooting season two. He described how the Maidens of the Spear — Aviendha, Bain and Chiad — lived a nomadic life and had to carry everything they needed with them, including many weapons. I thought ‘How am I going to make this work dramatically and practically when the spears are 2/3 of the height of the actresses?!’ It was a real challenge but through a process of trial and error and many hours problem solving with the combined skills of Rob Goodwin (couture leather maker), armorers and the props team, we finally created a series of holsters and quick release panels that meant the spears and bucklers could be anchored to the girls’ backs, creating an aesthetically pleasing ‘fan’ shape, and at the same time have a practicality to them.

(Left to right) Maja Simonsen as Chiad, Ragga Ragnars as Bain, Ayoola Smart as Aviendha, and Marcus Rutherford as Perrin Aybara, walking through a desert. Aviendha, Bain and Chiad all have long reddish-brown hair. They wears very similar outfits: sand-brown hoods, black scarves, brown leather armor over sand-brown tunics, skirts and trousers, with short spears strapped to their backs. Perrin has short dark frizzy hair and a beard, and wears a dark green woven-leather vest over a faded red long-sleeved shirt with olive-green trousers and brown boots.
(Left to right) Chiad, Bain, Aviendha, and Perrin Aybara | Jan Thijs/Prime Video

LS: Something I adore about the costumes in The Wheel Of Time is the timeless quality they possess; you can’t lock them down to a specific era, because there’s such a wide range of fabrics and materials on display, as well as techniques. How much freedom do you give yourself in that regard?

SG: The scope of The Wheel Of Time is so huge. Robert Jordan’s detailed descriptions of the cultural references that make up each nation (Cairhien = French/Japanese; Seanchan = Mesoamerican/Imperial Chinese, for example) make for a very rich starting point. The first thing I did was start to collect fabrics, accessories, trims, etc., from the actual cultures described so that we had the authenticity of those fabrics at our fingertips. I shopped in markets in France, in vintage shops in the UK, and suppliers internationally. I tried as much as possible to use all these fabrics directly in the manufacturing of the costumes, which gave them a real sense of being grounded or anchored in reality.

Sometimes it was only a scrap of fabric that was available, so I was lucky enough to be able to enlist the help of our incredibly talented textiles department, who were able to recreate the fabric. This could mean either screen-printing the fabric on our 5m long printing table (the Seanchan culture, the Whitecloaks’ undergarments), hand painting onto silk (Suroth’s kimono, Adeleas’ colorful kimono), or applying foil directly to the fabric (Lanfear’s part-Japanese, part-French coat). One of the cornerstones of the philosophy behind the design process for The Wheel Of Time is that the costumes should feel as if they have been created using pre-Industrial Revolution manufacturing techniques.

The sense of freedom comes from being able to move through different periods of time in our history and find inspiration from those time periods. Everything has a reference and a significance but you can pick and choose your moments and your movements. For example, the Seanchan triangular print which features in all of the costumes of that society from the soldiers to the da’covale to the High Lords and Ladies is based on an Anni Albers design from the 1960s combined with an Alexander McQueen-esque reptilian print. Anything and everything is possible.

Daniel Francis as High Lord Turak, standing in front of a pink stucco wall. He is bald. He wears an intricate collar of bone over a black feathered mantle, over a black-and-gold scale-patterned robe with a long dark blue train. The first two fingernails on both his hands are extremely long and bladed.
High Lord Turak | Jan Thijs/Prime Video

LS: The character of Lanfear has become a fan-favorite in no small part because she’s always so fabulously dressed. My jaw literally dropped when she was revealed in the World of Dreams for the first time at the end of season two, episode five [Damane]. How did you reach that iconic look?

SG: Lanfear — like the other Forsaken — comes from a time when the world was more developed: the time before the ‘Breaking’ when the world collapsed. As such, the Forsaken have the most futuristic style costumes. In the scene you’re describing, Lanfear is at her most devastating, fetishistic, dominatrix self, so it made sense for her costume to reflect this. The design of the bodice is deliberately asymmetrical to show how unbalanced she is, a theme that is often echoed in the Forsaken costumes. I wanted her to have a dramatic headdress which referenced her symbol of the moon and a vicious weapon simultaneously. It also plays with the dual concepts of saidar and saidin, the male and female halves of the One Power, similar to yin and yang. She is at once terrifying and compelling. It is so much fun to incorporate as many of the layers of symbolism in The Wheel Of Time books as possible, even in a single costume.

Natasha O’Keeffe as Lanfear, descending from a stone dais in the middle of the desert, upon which stands a circular throne. She has short jet-black hair under a black crescent-moon headdress. She wears a black leather harness over a black dress wit thigh-high slits and one sleeve covering her right arm, with thigh-high black lace-up high-heeled boots.
Lanfear | Provided by Sharon Gilham

LS: Each of the seven Aes Sedai Ajahs has its own highly individual philosophy. How does that come across in their costumes? And, with a character like Liandrin, how do you convey through clothing that she’s not only Red Ajah but also belongs to the undercover Black Ajah?

SG: When I first started on The Wheel Of Time, I wanted to expand the iconography behind each of the Ajah groups, to give them a kind of rationale relating to color as well as their role within the White Tower. In the books, the Reds are the law enforcement, the Blues spies, the Yellows healers, and so on. I took those colors and those roles and made a series of ‘rules’ about the type of fabrics or shapes of clothing that would be worn to more explicitly demonstrate the connection between the color and the role within the White Tower society and the Wheel Of Time world as a whole.

The Reds have more restrictive clothing and materials — leathers and structured fabrics like wools and heavy cottons — and the Blues have more fluid fabrics that suggest how they flow through the landscape in their search for the truth, and so on. Liandrin’s costumes in season two become gradually more militaristic, almost gestapo-like. In season three, the black even begins to spill into her costume physically. As we move through season three, I wanted her costumes to move away from the physical black into a manifestation that felt even more dangerous, which will become more apparent in later episodes.

Kate Fleetwood as Liandrin Guirale, standing in a stone doorway, looking up. She has long blonde hair. She wears a red-brown leather vest over a long-sleeved red coat, with a red stone hanging around her neck.
Liandrin Guirale | Amazon MGM Studios

LS: What are you most excited for fans to see in season three?

SG: So many things! There are epic events in almost every episode, there are so many incarnations of so many characters, new worlds and scenarios that unfold and reveal new characters within them…but there is one character that I can’t mention here, that I think fans of the books and Wheel Of Time novices alike will be very excited to see.

LS: On a more personal note, is there any specific film or costume designer’s body of work that inspired you to become a costume designer?

SG: I have been inspired by many films along the way, from Peter Greenaway films like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Eiko Ishioka’s costumes for The Fall, Linda Muir’s work on films like Nosferatu, and Michele Clapton’s work on Game Of Thrones, which really pushed fantasy into a new era. You can see where the costume designer has been allowed a kind of freedom, which results in a really strong visual aesthetic to the work. This was the case for me on The Wheel Of Time.

Poster of Priyanka Bose as Alanna Mosvani. She has dark hair pulled back in braids. She wears brown leather armor with a collar over a dark green dress with thigh-high slits. Her body and clothes are dissolving into leaves. Text reads “The Wheel Of Time: New Season, March 13th”.
Alanna Mosvani | Amazon MGM Studios

LS: And finally, of the seven Aes Sedai Ajahs, which would you belong to and why?

SG: Well, it has to be the Greens. Partly because these days more than ever women need to embrace and manifest the warrior inside; and partly because I was given a green Aes Sedai ring as a birthday present from my team and it was personally presented to me by none other than Moiraine Damodred herself!

The Wheel Of Time returns for its third season on March 13th, only on Prime Video.

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Exclusive: “The Rings Of Power” Costume Designer Talks Season Two, Sauron, And More

SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO AHEAD!

Charlie Vickers as Annatar in The Rings Of Power, standing with his right hand raised to his chin in a contemplative gesture. He has long blond hair held back by a serpentine gold circlet, and wears a brown leather apron over a silver robe with minimal silver embroidery around the collar. He also wears brown leather arm-wraps.
Annatar | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

Just before the premiere of Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power season two in late August, I had the pleasure of speaking with the epic fantasy series’ costume designer, Luca Mosca. We touched on Sauron and Tom Bombadil, but at the time, he couldn’t tell me much about specific characters and their costumes. Now that the season is over, I sat down for another interview with Mosca to talk a little bit more in-depth about the season, specific costumes, and his experience working on The Rings Of Power.

Leith Skilling: So I wanted to start by first saying congratulations to you and your entire team. Season two was so well-received, and the costumes were just beautiful across the board.

Luca Mosca: Thank you so much. I should really stress on the word “Team”, because I was nothing in the face of the skills and professionality and efficiency of my entire Team. Not one of those costumes would be there were it were not for the Team. It takes a village and it’s really like a bee-hive operation and I’ve been chosen to be the queen bee. And everybody around me was just pure excellence. So I wanted to make sure that you are aware that you’re not talking to one person but you’ll be talking to hundreds.

LS: Especially on a production of this scale, I can only imagine how many people are involved at every level.

LM: I think we have been the largest TV show ever made. In New Zealand in particular, one really had the feeling that we were doing something colossal and immense.

LS: Well, on that note, how did you get involved with The Rings Of Power?

LM: I got a call out of the clear blue sky from one of the executive producers who explained that they were sadly losing their costume designer [Kate Hawley] and who invited me to join the show in New Zealand, so I interviewed, put together a few sketches and I was hired.

Luca Mosca standing with his arms wrapped around his sister Erica. Luca is wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt. Erica is wearing a blue-green headscarf and black-and-white dress.
Luca Mosca with his sister Erica | image courtesy of Luca Mosca

I was coming from the John Wick trilogy but could not join John Wick 4 because I had to go to Italy and join my family for a couple of months because my little sister who had gone skiing off-trail had met her death together with her boyfriend in an avalanche and I had to go tend to my elderly father who had been left alone. That was a true emotional cataclysm in my life. Once my father was taken care of, I was able to leave my dad in capable hands, fly to New Zealand and join the show. It was the proverbial “rollercoaster” or the “peaks and valleys” of life.

LS: Had you read the books or was this world entirely new to you?

LM: Although I was familiar with the trilogy, I read the books again in order to become an “expert” but here’s another intimidating thing: you think you know Lord Of The Rings because you know Saruman and Gollum but then you go into this kind of production and you are surrounded by so much knowledge and you hear people talk and it’s like “what are they talking about?” It’s gigantic, it’s a culture, it’s a language of its own, there are people who know how to write the runes and people who know how to read them, people who know everything and every single detail inside-out, it was an intimidating feeling.

Trystan Gravelle as Pharazon in The Rings Of Power, striding towards the camera with his hands by his side, as a wind whips at him. He has long dark hair going gray and a beard streaked with black. He wears a crimson robe with a long cloak and an ornamental silver breastplate with numerous belts around his waist.
Pharazôn | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

LS: We have to talk about Sauron, because he really is the center of season two. There’s so much fan art that’s been made of Sauron in his “fair form” as Annatar: did you try to reference any of that, and what other references and influences went into creating his new look?

LM: I had to tap into my background, my culture and my heritage and I started researching how in the Middle Ages a good monk would be depicted or a good prophet or a good Samaritan or a good messenger, since we drew a lot of visual inspiration from Middle Ages art or from the Byzantine period or from the Renaissance. One feature of that costume is that it is very drapey even if it looked like it was made out of burlap. The fabric was actually a precious raw silk that looked like burlap because the weave was open and rustic looking. We used this open weave quality and underneath it we put a shiny, silvery fabric that – only at times, only with movement when the knee or the elbow or the chest were pushing against the fabrics and only in places of contact – it shimmered through.

And that to me was one of the most successful costumes because it showed the “deceit” of Sauron: “Oh, look at me, I’m a humble creature, I’m a humble man, I’m dressed in burlap like a poor monk begging for scraps of food”. But in reality, if you dug through his costume, you would find all this decadent luxury underneath the first layer of fabric that is not typical of a monk. It was a beautiful concept and this is what we do as costume designers since we are storytellers and sometimes we even inform the actor of who their character is. Actors sometimes meet their character in front of a mirror in the fitting room, and Charlie Vickers loved that costume.

LS: Sauron and Galadriel obviously have a very close relationship and their journeys parallel each other this season. Do you design one’s outfit with the other one in mind?

LM: Absolutely. Always, always. We prepare “line-ups” of costumes: the illustrations are all lined up on a sheet of paper or on a board, to make sure – and this is something I do in every movie – to make sure that there are no clashes, or no similarities, or if there are similarities, they happen on purpose. Only once I display them out, only after seeing them all together I realize conflicts or issues, so yes: we do design costumes with that in mind, with a palette in mind and the costume of Sauron, the “fair form” at least, had a little bit of an Elven quality. It wasn’t the coloring of Celebrimbor, it wasn’t the greens and the purples of Eregion, but in terms of drape and fluidity and shape, it could very well pass for an Elf. So we do design these things with that in mind, and if you think about it, Sauron’s “fair form” is the same color as Galadriel’s armor, right?

LS: There’s been some speculation online over the similar silhouette and color palette of Sauron’s “fair form” costume and the costume of Celeborn, Galadriel’s husband, in The Lord Of The Rings films – was there any intent behind that?

LM: Not at all, that is not something that we had in mind or that we intended to reference.

Benjamin Walker as Gil-galad and Robert Aramayo as Elrond, standing side-by-side, surrounded by Orcs. Gil-galad has long dark brown hair and wears a burnished gold breastplate emblazoned with the intertwining gold and silver branches of the Two Trees of Valinor over a long-sleeved pale yellow tunic with large pauldrons and vambraces. Elrond has short, tousled dark brown hair and wears a very similar suit of armor but in silver. He has a deep wound in his right cheek, and blood is running down his face.
Gil-galad and Elrond | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

LS: Is foreshadowing something that you try to incorporate into the costuming? A lot of characters die this season – Celebrimbor, Adar, King Durin – are there any signals to their eventual fates that you incorporate into the costume?

LM: I try to, as much as possible, because us costume designers are psychologists and we try to give hints but sometimes like in the case of the death of Celebrimbor, it’s in the lore and is a known fact, the audience knows in advance. Celebrimbor’s look was one of the big tasks that I was met with when I landed in New Zealand. The Studio wanted a dignified, elegant and elevated Celebrimbor. And again, tapping back into my heritage of history and art, I thought that the best reference for Celebrimbor would have been Dante. Next time you see images of Dante or Dante with Beatrice, note how that kind of fluid gown is kind of translated into Celebrimbor’s costume. This kind of artistic “concept” is very seductive for the audience, for the director, for the actor or the producer. That was another successful translation of cultural elements from my particular background into modern filmmaking.

LS: Do you have a favorite group to design for; Elves, Dwarves, Númenóreans?

LM: You’re basically asking me as a parent to choose his favorite child – that’s impossible! So without telling you what was my favorite or my least-favorite – I can tell you that honestly I did not have a least-favorite, because every world and culture of Rings Of Power was so creatively enjoyable to design and I could go from looking at a bloodied Orc to seeing a celestial Elf during the same costume fitting session and the mental and creative stimulation of going from from Dwarves to Númenóreans or from Orcs to Elves was so satisfying. I particularly loved Númenor. Númenor is to me like ancient Rome at the peak – but at that last day of the peak, when after that the fall of the empire happened. It was at the peak of luxury and decadence and refinement with beautiful fabrics, shiny jewel-tones or primary colors. The Elves were elegant and the Orcs were so creative and designing for the Dwarves was so incredible, but Númenor was a feast of colors, of luxury, of embroidery, it was phenomenal.

LS: When designing armor, what is the process behind that, and especially for the Elves, how do you balance the beauty and aesthetics with practicality and durability?

LM: The first armor that I was tasked to design was for the elven army of Eregion. We looked at brass statues that were becoming tarnished with the verdigris of oxidation. And in my understanding of Eregion – and that’s why I used so much green in it, green and colors of foliage – in Eregion they were master builders and their city was incredible but they never prevented nature from coming indoors. So moss, lichen and creeping ivy were not trimmed but they were invited in and they were part of the environment. So the oxidation concept came up and I applied green “verdigris” to the armor.

How do we make them durable? Durability is a big problem, because much of the armor, just because of the nature of it, goes through battles with a lot of action and gets damaged. But the armor also needs to be made out of materials that are light and safe enough for the actor to wear. Can you only imagine if there were a sharp metal edge and I sent the actor out in it and they fell and got cut and injured? So the choice of materials is very important and is part of a long process. When I pass on the final sketch to the armorer who asks me: “are you sure?”, the little voice inside me says “No, I’m not! I will never be sure, give me another day, give me another week, give me another month”. But we have to move on and to commit to a specific design and to give it to a sculptor who first makes it in clay and also to a metalworker who makes a prototype out of real metal. At that stage I have to pull the trigger and say “this is it” and there’s no going back. For Gil-galad or Elrond the armor was slightly different and personalized, it was similar to the rest of the soldiers yet with slight differences and touches that made it unique to them.

LS: Where do the costumes currently reside?

LM: They’re all back in London at the Studios. As you could see there were a lot of costumes from season one in season two, and costumes from both seasons will also be carried over into the next seasons.

Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor in The Rings Of Power, seated at a small desk watching a candle burning. He has tousled brown hair streaked with soot and grime, and wears a brown leather apron over a dark green robe with holly leaves embroidered in spring green and gold around the collar. The tools and accoutrements of a jewelsmith are scattered about him.
Celebrimbor | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ross Ferguson / Prime Video

LS: Lastly, a silly question. When the Lord Of The Rings films came out, there were Barbie dolls of characters like Arwen, Galadriel, Legolas. Is there any chance of a Sauron Barbie doll or a Galadriel Barbie doll for The Rings Of Power?

LM: (laughs) I don’t know, because I’m not involved with that side of marketing. What I do know is that there was a doll of John Wick in the black suit that was not made by the Studio. So these dolls might exist but I am unaware of them.

LS: We have to get on Amazon’s case to make the official versions.

LM: I will definitely make a request and say that Leith requested Barbie dolls.

LS: Well, that is all the time we have. Thank you so much for your time.

LM:  You have to shut me up because I could continue for hours as I like to reminisce about all of this; it was a beautiful experience. Let’s hope that the costumes get – that the whole series in general, the actors and the sets and everybody – get the due recognition during awards season.

LS: Emmys all around!

LM: I’m not a big social media person so I don’t have a “thermometer” of what’s going on but I hear a lot of positive stuff so – fingers crossed!

All episodes of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power season two are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Exclusive: Costume Designer Luca Mosca Talks “The Rings Of Power”

Ahead of the release of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power season two, I had the privilege of speaking to the epic fantasy series’ costume designer, Luca Mosca, who takes over from Kate Hawley this season. Mosca’s behind-the-camera credits include The Last Witch Hunter, Paranoia, Vantage Point and the first three entries in the John Wick film franchise, preparing him for the unique challenges of designing for Elves, Dwarves, Humans, Harfoots, Orcs and more, on one of the largest television series’ ever made.

Luca Mosca at the premiere for The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power. He is wearing a black suit and tie.
Luca Mosca | image courtesy of Luca Mosca

Leith Skilling: We’ve heard that this season of The Rings Of Power takes the series to a much darker place, tonally and thematically. How have the costumes evolved to reflect that?

Luca Mosca: This season is action versus lore: last season, we introduced the characters, but what you will see this season is lots of intense epic pieces that require intense costuming. Sauron is definitely darker but since he is deceitful he can also appear in “fair form” in order to mislead both us and the characters that he is juxtaposed to. In terms of designs, we manipulated his fabrics by dyeing and distressing them, and we played with shapes to be more or less fluid or drapey, in order to go along with the misleading message. Sometimes, a fabric appears one way, but it may reveal a shiny underlayer to create the illusion of something that exists or maybe does not exist, something that is visible only partially or only at different moments.

Tanya Moodie as Gundabel in The Rings Of Power, standing in the center of a village built into the steep walls of a sandy ravine. She has dark frizzy hair, and wears a saffron-yellow dress with wide reddish-brown sleeves and a long necklace made of knitted yarn, from which hangs a large round medallion.
Gundabel | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ross Ferguson / Prime Video

LS: The Rings Of Power is heading to locations, like the land of Rhûn, that the books never described in much detail. When designing for an entirely new culture and its characters, where do you look for inspiration, and what are the difficulties of creating something that has to feel distinct but still exist within the context of Middle-earth?

LM: We always start with intense research. My team and I consulted art and history books and ancient artifacts. I am a museum rat and I spent days in the various museums of New Zealand, New York, London and Paris, absorbing cultures and time periods and drawing inspiration from textures, fabrics, colors and shapes ranging from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages, from Baroque to the late 1800s.

Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil in The Rings Of Power, photographed from the waist up, standing in a dimly-lit room of his humble house. He has long curly reddish-brown hair and a beard. He wears a tall gray feathered hat, and a blue jacket over a white tunic with a brown belt.
Tom Bombadil | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ross Ferguson / Prime Video

LS: This season, you got to create one of the most iconic outfits described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings; Tom Bombadil’s feathered cap, bright blue jacket, and bright yellow boots. What were the challenges of bringing that from page to screen?

LM: Tolkien was very specific when describing some details of Tom Bombadil’s outfit. Our goal was not to immediately make him identifiable as Tom Bombadil, and we played with tonal variations of the colors described in the lore, and when you meet him on the screen, hopefully he won’t immediately jump at you for who he really is.

LS: Costume design is a collaborative process with several other departments, and with the actors who will be wearing the costumes. Can you briefly take us through the process of bringing a costume from sketch to screen?

LM: After the initial sketch, a very detailed illustration of the final costume is created. The choice of colors and fabrics are driven by the interior sets or the exterior locations, so I encourage a constant back-and-forth with the art department. When we created a new civilization this season, on top of the photos of the location, we obtained samples of sand, dirt, dust and vegetation from the actual location in order to design the costumes in harmony with the landscape and to “ground” the characters in their environment.

Cynthia Addai-Robinson as Miriel in The Rings Of Power, facing left, walking past a row of onlookers in a great hall. She has curly dark hair, bunched up and hanging in loose ringlets. She wears a silver diadem encrusted with large black gemstones, and a black-and-white mosaic collar over a long white gown.
Queen Regent Míriel | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

LS:  The costume I’m personally most excited to see onscreen is the white dress and mosaic collar Míriel wears this season [pictured above], that was on display at San Diego Comic-Con last month. If possible, can you tell me anything about how that dress came to be and how difficult it was to create?

LM: Maybe the adjective “difficult” should be replaced with “elaborate” because it involved so many components and so many sub-departments of the costume department were involved. The costume required the work of smiths, jewelers, embroiders and milliners on top of dyers, cutters and stitchers. Queen Regent Míriel wears that costume for a scene that evokes emotions, and we thought of a watery theme, where water represents feelings. The collar is encrusted with pearls and with a mosaic of mother of pearl, almost to evoke a submarine creature living inside a seashell.

LS: If you had to choose one, which costume are you most proud of and why?

LM: Please don’t ask a parent to choose his favorite child 🙂

Sophia Nomvete as Disa in The Rings Of Power, standing in an underground stone hall, amongst a group of Dwarven women. She has long dark curly hair, and wears a floor-length gray gown. She has gold bracelets on her wrists and gold-dust on her fingers.
Disa | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

LS: What inspired you to become a costume designer, and which costume designer’s work is an influence on you?

LM: My background is fashion. I never thought in my early years that I would have shifted my career towards film and TV, but movies came to me one after the other and the transition was organic and almost seamless. It was the “oldies” from the 40s, 50s and 60s that shaped my cinematic taste. I can tell you that at least once a year I like to rewatch Dr. Zhivago.

LS: Finally, if you could go back in time, is there any film you would have loved to have done the costumes for?

LM: It would be an old movie that I love so much, therefore I would not want to have done costumes for it because they are perfectly beautiful as they are.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power season two premieres Thursday, August 29th, on Amazon Prime Video.

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“Carol” Review! Is It A Christmas Movie Or Not?

Is 2015’s Carol a Christmas movie, in the proper sense of the phrase? Some would argue it is simply by virtue of being set in the last few weeks of December (and because one of the most memorable scenes in the movie revolves around the subject of Christmas presents), but in my opinion, it’s even a bit deeper than that.

Carol
Carol Aird | cinemablographer.com

Carol utilizes Christmas for more than just pretty set dressing. The overwhelming noise and chaotic hustle of the holiday season provides the perfect backdrop to the quiet, intimate, love story at the film’s core. The crowds of confused and hurried shoppers rushing to find gifts is an unmistakable parallel to the confusion of any whirlwind romance, but particularly one shared by two women in an unaccepting era – when even the terminology for sexual orientation was still unclear and mostly derogatory. And Christmas brings with it a whole slew of constraints and restrictions on the time our heroines can spend together without being watched. But…whenever the romance finally has a moment to breathe, everything goes quiet. The noise dies down until it’s little more than a murmur in the background; Carter Burwell’s Oscar-nominated score gently reinforces the building passion; and the spirit of Christmas is discovered in simple things like snowfall on a terrace at night, a Christmas tree purchased on the spur of the moment, or an abrupt winter getaway out west.

Based on The Price Of Salt (a semi-autobiographical novel first published in 1952 by Patricia Highsmith under a pseudonym and later republished in 1990 as Carol under her real name), Carol remains a milestone in LGBTQ+ representation in film: the movie that launched a thousand awards-friendly atmospheric period dramas about introspective white lesbians. The story is small-scale on the surface – a series of electric interactions between two women that quickly becomes a fling, and then a romance – but the stakes couldn’t be higher for either character: Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) is at risk of losing custody of her daughter if her sexuality is discovered, while Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) is already engaged to a man for whom she has no feelings. The chemistry between the two actresses is the primary reason for why the movie works as well as it does, and for why it feels so genuine and impactful.

Carol
Therese Belivet and Carol Aird | artforum.com

Carol, the mysterious, multi-faceted woman around whom the story revolves, is the older and wiser of the two; but while her years have given her a flippant attitude towards life and a steady, self-assured command over herself, her surroundings, and her sexuality, they haven’t quieted her desire to finally live freely. Blanchett owns the role like a revelation wrapped up in an epiphany and a sensuous mink coat. And what’s brilliant about Blanchett’s performance (here and elsewhere) is that she never feels the need to overdo anything. Every one of her movements, mannerisms, facial expressions, winks, and subtle half-smiles is loaded with purpose – but so casually conveyed that Blanchett never comes off as fishing for Oscars. Oftentimes, the philosophical dialogue spouted in dramas can come off as inorganic and bizarrely forced, but Blanchett’s line-readings, delivered in that famously deep register that she might as well trademark, are equal halves relatable and enchanting.

The strength of Mara’s performance is in how clearly and vividly she expresses her love for Carol. While the extent of Carol’s feelings toward Therese Belivet are necessarily mysterious and unclear until the very end of the film (and Blanchett easily sells that aura of mystery, where you never know if something she’s said has a double entendre or a hidden meaning), the entire story hinges on Therese’s immediate attraction to Carol. It sounds quite simple – Cate Blanchett is a magnetic personality, after all – but Mara succeeds at convincing us that Therese’s devotion goes deeper than a surface-level. And although the film can’t take us into Therese’s head like the novel, it gets as close as it possibly can. Director Todd Haynes stages each romantic scene as if from Therese’s point of view, as she absorbs every tiny detail about her lover. That subtly allows us to also learn about Therese’s own self-doubt, which prevents her from recognizing her own worth until much later in the film, when the tables are turned.

Alongside powerhouse talents like Blanchett and Mara, it’s hard for anyone else in the movie to carve out much space for themselves. Sarah Paulson comes closest, playing Blanchett’s former lover Abby. Paulson, herself one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ actresses in Hollywood (and whose wife, Holland Taylor, was one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ actresses in Hollywood), has a key supporting role, holding her own opposite Blanchett as the latter’s foil. Also, her ability to slay in brown plaid is admirable, and I would totally watch the Carol prequel Paulson wants to make.

Behind the scenes, pretty much everybody deserves some measure of praise, because the film is a technical masterpiece: but I would especially point out Carter Burwell, whose score beautifully compliments the action; costume designer Sandy Powell, the mastermind behind Carol’s assortment of fur coats, headscarves, and sundresses; and cinematographer Edward Lachman, whose decision to shoot in grainy 16mm film is a large part of why the entire film feels so engrossing.

Carol
Carol Aird | bloomberg.com

But the key to Carol‘s success and popularity (and something which many of its predecessors and successors have forgotten or ignored) is its happy ending, something that stunned readers back in 1952 and viewers in 2015. Little has changed between those two dates, if a simple happy ending is still perceived as groundbreaking in stories (particularly romances) about LGBTQ+ characters, and too little has changed even in the five years since Carol came out. But onscreen representation matters: it has the power to uplift and to inspire. And that’s exactly what Carol‘s ending did for many viewers, by promising something better. Even if it’s not a traditional Christmas movie, it invokes the true spirit of the season far better than some.

Movie Rating: 9.5/10