“Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” and “Say Nothing” both take place during the “Me” Decade, but in wildly different worlds. Peacock’s “Fight Night” unfolds in Atlanta in 1970, when Muhammad Ali flew into town and won his comeback fight after a three-year boxing ban, while the country’s most powerful figures in the Black Mafia got robbed at a party celebrating that victory. Across the Atlantic and up through the Irish Sea to Belfast is FX’s “Say Nothing,” which chronicles the Troubles in Northern Ireland beginning in the early ’70s. On one side: suave gangsters led by Samuel L. Jackson’s Frank “the Black Godfather” Moten. On the other: working-class members of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army fighting for a united republic free of British soldiers. Here, we dive into both limited series.
FIGHT NIGHT: THE MILLION DOLLAR HEIST
FRANK “THE BLACK GODFATHER” MOTEN and RICHARD “CADILLAC” WHEELER
The show doesn’t take itself too seriously — its tagline is “Based on some shit that really happened” — so costume designer Ernesto Martinez felt free to push beyond funky, orange-and-brown ’70s archetypes and Blaxploitation images. “I wanted it to look like an elegant 1970s, not too Dolemite but really cool,” he said. “I wanted to make Atlanta cool and the gangsters in it cool, but I did a more British vibe, like a British dandy.”
The tailored, sophisticated look is most evident in Jackson’s character, who spends the series searching for local players who were stupid enough to rob him. He is always impeccably dressed in blues, burgundies and browns. Here, he’s wearing a double-breasted suit that Martinez and his team made from silk mohair bought in London.
“We made everything for all the main actors,” he said. “They’re all big names and kind of picky about wardrobe, so if you bring in vintage suits, they don’t fit right. I made four of each (outfit) because they do a lot of stunts. There’s a lot of shootings, a lot of murder.” According to Martinez, Jackson liked his threads so much he kept most of them. “I think he said, ‘I want my clothes in my contract,’” the costume designer said, laughing. “Samuel was a lot of fun. He just knew how to wear the clothes.”
For Terrence Howard’s ambitious criminal, Cadillac, Martinez gave him a slightly younger, less polished look that would not compete with the Farrah Fawcett-like hairpiece he wears. “That crazy wig. He was dead set on the wig,” the designer said. “It’s a fun piece in the movie, and I said, ‘If I give him too much costume, it’s just going to go way over the top.’”
GORDON “CHICKEN MAN” WILLIAMS
Kevin Hart plays an aspiring Atlanta gangster who organizes the post-Ali fight party for Moten and the other bigwigs but has nothing to do with the armed robbery. He is nowhere near boss level, so Martinez dressed him more casually in lots of denim and leather, incorporating styles from Richard Roundtree’s iconic John Shaft character, plus legendary musicians like Sly Stone, Earth, Jimi Hendrix and Earth, Wind & Fire.
“I just thought this guy would emulate rock stars,” Martinez said. “I remember seeing Jimi Hendrix in a python jacket and I said, ‘That would be great for Chicken Man to go to the fight, like, put on his big dog-and-pony show.’” The team made the jacket from python-print leather cut just so. “(We needed) to make Kevin not look as good as he really does,” Martinez said. “He’s really buff, and I wanted to hide that, because Chicken Man cannot be like that.”
VIVIAN THOMAS
Chicken Man’s whip-smart mistress (played by Taraji P. Henson) is a former sex worker who’s looking to get rich by launching her own numbers game. “I wanted her to still have a je ne sais quoi, so her wardrobe was pretty cool: halter dresses, turbans and pantsuits in suede,” Martinez said. He designed her fabulous leopard-print jumpsuit in silk jersey after seeing a similar Bob Mackie vintage piece.
For the disastrous party, he made a red silk charmeuse dress that was a reinterpretation of a Halston number that model Karin Bjornson famously wore. “I had to make a dress that she could take off easily to dance in her underwear,” Martinez said. (One of the robbers forces her to strip.) As for the silk chiffon bolero, “the jacket was a last-minute add-on — like, ‘Here, sew this up!’ We had to cover her up a little bit so that we don’t give away the reveal.”
J.D. HUDSON
Don Cheadle, who plays the detective investigating the robbery and subsequent murders, has the most strait-laced look of the characters. “Seventies buttoned-up, really nice guy, family man, detective — there’s a template for him. I just copied what a detective would have worn then from, like, Alexander’s department store or Gimbels,” Martinez said, referencing two popular midrange retailers from the era. The team made this gray three-piece suit in wool gabardine after trying an initial attempt in polyester, but that “looked too cool,” according to the designer. “So we went back to natural fabrics.”
SAY NOTHING
DOLOURS and MARIAN PRICE
Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book by the same name, this limited series is more tethered to the historic record than “Fight Night” while still leaving costume designer Jane Petrie room for creative interpretation. “We were doing an honest version, but it wasn’t like doing a biopic,” she said. Early in the series, sisters Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and Marian Price (Hazel Doupe) rob a bank dressed as nuns, which their real-life counterparts successfully carried out in 1972.
Petrie’s team rented the traditional black habits but made the white-cotton wimples (head coverings) to ensure the right fit. For the first four episodes, she kept both characters in muted tones to reflect the war-torn Belfast landscape. But when they travel to London to bomb the Old Bailey courthouse in Episode 5, it’s as if a Technicolor switch has been flipped.
“When they get to London, (they see) what their lives could have been, and it’s almost like the world went full color, because everything’s available in London,” Petrie said. “I wanted to show a bit of the freedom that people had from the ’60s counterculture that had a big impact in London but wouldn’t have reached Belfast. Particularly with the religious (aspects of the Troubles), there’s a very conservative angle to their upbringing. And then suddenly they see this great world available.”
TECHNICOLOR TRAVELING CLOTHES
Dolours’ clothing undergoes the biggest change. On the day of the bombing, she wears a bright blue trench coat over a green sweater and yellow bell-bottoms — a mix of vintage finds and new garments made by Petrie’s team. It’s the outfit she has on when the police catch up with her and Marian at the airport and arrest them before they can fly back to Ireland.
DRESSING FOR THEIR DAY IN COURT
When their trial begins, we see Dolours in a demure burnt- orange floral skirt and jacket that Petrie’s team made. She based the look on the work of ’70s British designer Ossie Clark and on styles found in teen magazines that would have been available to the Price sisters in Belfast at the time: “Jackie” and “Honey,” not “Vogue” or “Cosmopolitan.”
“They were both really into fashion, and it was well documented that when they went to court, they wore a different outfit every single day,” Petrie said. (By this time, the more reserved Marian hd gone back to a subdued palette of grays and blacks.)
GERRY ADAMS
In the series, Gerry Adams (Josh Finan) is a high-ranking commander of the IRA, though the real Adams denies to this day ever having been a member of the group. Petrie gave the twentysomething Adams a revolutionary socialist look with an academic bent.
“He says in the script that he wanted to go to university when it was all over,” she said. “I looked at a lot of beatniks and other things that he might have aspired to. I liked the bookish angle being blunted.” By the early ’80s, Adams had moved into politics (he was the leader of the Sinn Féin political party for 34 years) and had adopted a more professorial look: button-down shirts under neat
sweaters and corduroy jackets.
BRENDAN “THE DARK” HUGHES
Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) was a trickier assignment. Because “the Dark” was involved in some of the IRA’s most top-secret, dangerous activity, his father destroyed most of the photos of his son to protect his identity.
But Petrie knew Hughes had traveled in the merchant navy and had lived a different life from most of his Belfast peers. “We made him neat and tried to show that he’d had that discipline in the merchant navy for a period of his life,” she said. “I had to piece together something from those few photographs that we’ve seen and mug shots. It felt like he should always be tucked in, no loose edges, just ready.”
This story first ran in the Limited Series/TV Movies issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Race Begins issue here.
