“The Pitt” upped the stakes of your typical medical drama when producers of the HBO Max series challenged makeup department head Myriam Arougheti and key makeup artist Merry Lee Traum to depict the aftermath of a mass shooting that transforms the Pittsburgh ER into a war zone in Episode 13.
The duo made charts for each survivor months in advance, tracking the progression of how their blood, sweat and dirt would combine and change over the hours they’re at the hospital. Traum likened that combination to a “beautiful patchwork quilt,” adding, “It’s all these people’s lives coming together, and they’re suffering through this terrible tragedy, and you have (Noah Wyle’s) Dr. Robby kind of falling apart. And it’s being told through the story of this quilt that we’ve created.”
Subtle details in the makeup include the vibrant flowers painted on one character’s face when she and her boyfriend, Dr. Robby’s surrogate stepson Jake (Taj Speights), FaceTime the physician before the shooting, before it becomes smeared with blood and sweat. There’s also a grieving widow who pulls out her IV, her dripping blood resembling tears as she is struck dumb amid the devastation. In total, the makeup team used about 40 pints of fake blood for the scenes following the tragedy, along with 50 custom prosthetics and approximately 250 generic pieces for assorted wounds.
Above all, Arougheti and Traum worked to make the doctors and patients look as
realistic as possible. The team’s mission, Arougheti said, was to “push the effects, the medical procedures and injuries as far as we can and see things that we’ve never really shown on television.”
Katherine LaNasa’s Nurse Dana was one of the few characters to start the 7 a.m. shift with a full face of makeup—but when a disgruntled patient socks her in the face at the end of Episode 9, she’s bloodied and barefaced for the final six episodes. For those six hours, Arougheti opted not to use a prosthetic black eye due to the fast-moving nature of the show. Instead, she referenced photos of black-eye progressions as a guide for Dana’s injury, which gradually shifts from red to black.
For the victim of a gas-tank explosion introduced in Episode 10, Arougheti wanted to portray his full-body, third-degree burn not with the dark charcoal makeup that’s most commonly used on TV but with a lighter color palette of bright pinks, whites and yellows that she admitted can look odd if not applied correctly: “That happens a lot with real medical injuries. When you look at them, you’re like, ‘That doesn’t look real.’ So if you were to replicate that in makeup, people don’t believe it. It doesn’t look real because it looks so horrific.” While the makeup department head knew she was taking a risk, she wanted to push the envelope. “That is what a real burn can look like under those circumstances,” she said.
When a teen baseball player enters the ER with a gruesome eye injury that requires the doctors to cut his eye open to release the blood pooled up behind it, the makeup team built a prosthetic piece that the actor wore until it was time to film the incision. “When I’m given the scenario of what the injury is, I get to watch these real procedures on this medical- training website,” Arougheti said. “That procedure was one of the hardest ones for me to look at: cutting the eye open on the side. Obviously, we can’t do that on someone, so we had to do a full build.”
For the shot, they created an entire prosthetic head and pumped it with fake blood that gushes out when the scalpel goes in.
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Read more from the Down to the Wire: Drama issue here.
