Why Melissa McCarthy’s Eyebrows Are Uneven as Ursula in 'The Little Mermaid'

By Kirbie Johnson

In The Scenario, reporter Kirbie Johnson takes readers behind the scenes of the buzziest movies and TV shows to reveal how the best wigs, special effects makeup, and more are created. For this edition, Johnson speaks with the people responsible for the beauty moments — on land and under the sea — in Disney's live-action The Little Mermaid.

Growing up, The Little Mermaid was my favorite Disney movie. The music was unparalleled, I was entranced by Ursula's makeup, and perhaps I related just a little to the line "the human world is a mess." Now, 24 years after the original animated classic hit theaters, we’re getting the live-action version with stars Halle Bailey (Ariel), Melissa McCarthy (Ursula), Daveed Diggs (Sebastian), Awkwafina (Scuttle), Javier Bardem (Triton), and more.

Live-action remakes are a business strategy for Disney: When you have a prolific intellectual property library and an animated sequel doesn't make sense, live-action comes to the rescue and resuscitates classic films for a younger audience. Cinderella, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan have all gotten the live-action treatment in the last several years; we’ll be getting Moana, Lilo & Stitch, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs soon. Many could argue making a live-action version of The Lion King may have been the hardest to pull off — the entire movie revolves around talking animals, not realistic in the slightest. But what happens when you have to create the illusion of non-merpeople swimming and talking underwater?

Allure spoke with the team who brought these characters to life, from choosing the perfect shade of red hair for Bailey's Ariel to the story behind Ursula's brows and how they made each character's hair appear to be floating off the head when the actors weren't actually underwater.

McCarthy has confirmed her performance as Ursula was an homage to drag queens and it's been confirmed by animator Rob Minkoff that the 1989 film's animated character was based on drag queen Divine at the direction of lyricist and creative Howard Ashman. However, Oscar and BAFTA-winning hair and makeup designer Peter Swords King — a tenured expert who has worked on 53 films (maybe you’ve heard of Lord of the Rings?) — shares he didn't create Ursula's hair and makeup to replicate a drag queen exactly, because Ursula was originally designed to be a "grotesque" and "scary" villain of the story. However, Swords King was still influenced by the original character and that community, sharing he has been inspired by drag queens like Miss Fame for techniques like blending and contouring.

"Although [having been] inspired by drag queens, I didn't want her to look like a drag queen," says Swords King. "I wanted it to still be Melissa, and I think she liked the fact that it was still her, so we could see it was her." He noted that he didn't want her to look like a caricature of the original animated film's villain, which risked taking the audience out of the film if they were too busy discussing Ursula's hair and makeup design. This is why they didn't drastically overline McCarthy's lip shape and used gray for her brows instead of brown or black shades.

"Because I'm old," jokes Swords King, "[Ursula] inspired me as someone from the 1950s. [The original character is] in a cocktail dress, which is very ‘50s. I [told Melissa], ‘If this was not a Disney film, you would have a cigarette in one hand and a martini glass in the other.'"

To mark out McCarthy's brows so they could be repositioned above her natural brow line, he utilized the glue stick method and practiced by watching videos of drag queens demonstrating the process. The brows have been a talking point after a recent video showcasing McCarthy's transformation went viral on social media, with many noting the eyebrows were not symmetrical. That, however, was intentional.

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"If you look at her eyebrows, they're not perfectly identical," he says. "No one's eyebrows are perfectly identical unless they're plucked or threaded to an inch. I don't like super-manicured eyebrows. It starts looking a bit forced."

This will be less noticeable in the film, he notes, because we rarely will see Ursula straight-on. "We thought it would be funny if her makeup was bad and that she'd done it herself," he says. "We tried to smudge the lips and it didn't work because it was just too bad. So the only thing I did was raise her eyebrows slightly differently." This further confirms that McCarthy was not supposed to look like she was in Ursula drag: If she was, the brows would have been perfect. "If I'd been doing a drag look, it would have been three hours — nearly an hour on the eyebrows alone," Swords King says. Instead, McCarthy's look took a mere hour and a half.

There were other subtle artistic changes that were made to Ursula's look, like deviating from the original blue eyeshadow we’re normally accustomed to seeing on her, and instead landing on shades of green from Pat McGrath Labs palettes.

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"I’d done loads of tests beforehand before [McCarthy] arrived, and I’d tested lots of different colors," says Swords King. "We tested a lilac-purple eyeshadow, which looked great, and then Rob [Marshall, the director] said, ‘Shouldn't it be green?’ So we ended up with green eyes and red lips. With green, I think ‘under the sea,’ I think of seaweed, and I like the contrast with the green eyes and the red lips." Swords King also said the green complemented the purple in the skin.

Speaking of skin, he was insistent on making sure Ursula appeared to be a real person — as real as an underwater Octopus-woman can be — which meant deviating from using theatrical paint to turn McCarthy entirely purple. Instead, Ursula's makeup incorporated designer cosmetics, like Tom Ford foundation in McCarthy's natural tone and stick-on nails painted with Chanel Rouge Noir. A MAC Cosmetics cream palette that includes a purple color was used to shade and contour the face and down her neck. He dyed the roots of her white wig a pale pink and lilac so it blended naturally with the purple shadowing around her hairline.

Hair is a major focal point in this film. For the first time, Ariel has locs, and the hair team had to figure out how to make a largely non-underwater cast's hair appear as if it's floating under the sea.

McCarthy and most of the cast, with the exception of Bailey, all had wigs designed for them by Swords King, who reveals that they only ended up wearing them two days out of the film's shooting schedule. For the underwater scenes, the actors instead wore gray skull caps with tracking markers on them, with each wig scanned and digitally superimposed onto their heads. Bailey also wore a tracking cap over her locs.

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Tim Burke, the Oscar and BAFTA award-winning visual effects supervisor for the film, shared that before landing on exactly what Ariel would look like, the crew conducted movement studies, which would ultimately help dictate how the hair looked in the underwater scenes. "We did some tests to see how a mermaid would swim, how she would move, the speed she would travel," says Burke. Bailey's hair designer, Camille Friend, also helped with the tests, which involved filming body doubles with different types of hairstyles while they were actually underwater to see how their hair moved. "You learn very quickly that it doesn't do what you want it to do 90% of the time, quite often obscuring somebody's face, and the braids would behave differently to the loose hair," Friend says.

As Friend began locking down Bailey's hair design, dry costume and hair tests were also conducted, with wind being used to create movement in the hair for the sake of later referencing. "Once we got close [to the final look], we then photographed every aspect of it," says Burke. "Camille gave us references for how the braids were wound and the different colors used within it. We started building it as an asset for our computer generated (CG) mermaid." Bailey had a digital double built of her so the visual effects team could then start looking at how the hair would work underwater in a CG environment. That's when they started to fine-tune the movement of the hair.

As Burke noted, getting any real-life hair to do what they wanted it to while underwater would have been a challenge; it can become unruly and float uncontrollably, which was in opposition to Marshall's vision for the film, which was for the hair to be beautiful and elegant. "We knew we'd need to be able to control it in a way that normal underwater physics wouldn't allow us to if we tried to shoot it for real," says Burke, "So using a lot of the reference that we'd shot and seeing what we didn't like, and finding things we did like, we started to develop what we call the ‘hair simulations’. We didn't film underwater, so it was all done, essentially, on the computer. Everything underwater is basically digital apart from the actors' faces."

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Bailey's hairstyle was a combination of loose hair and locs, which in the real world wouldn't behave the same way when swimming underwater since the locs would be more dense. Therefore, the team decided to take some artistic liberties with her CG locs. "That was one of the key secrets, is giving the different parts and components of the hair the same property so that the [locs and loose hair] all behave in a very similar way," says Burke. Then, more tests. "When Halle was going to deliver dialog, we didn't want the hair to be doing too much because it might get distracting, so we’d have a simulation where it was calm and gentle. If she was traveling dynamically underwater, we'd let it flow more. In ‘Under the Sea’ or ‘Part of your World’ where she's swimming, she's doing somersaults and backflips, so we’d get some crazy moments where she would speed and the hair would open out and do what it really would do underwater."

For the underwater scenes, which Burke says accounts for about an hour's worth of the film, the actors' hair, body, shoulders, arms, and fishtails were added through visual effects. Bailey did go into an on-set tank for the scenes where she comes up from the water, and in those instances, you’ll see her actual hair on screen.

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Marshall wanted Ursula's hair to look more modern than the animated version. "The design Peter came up with was fantastic and had this lovely verticality to it," says Burke. "It naturally defied gravity. Rob didn't want it moving around too crazy and wanted a gentle movement in it to keep the underwater feel. That actually proved quite difficult because Halle's hair could move and flow but Melissa's hair was crafted into that sort of very iconic shape, so that it was difficult to make it look like it was moving beautifully underwater."

If you read the long crew list for this movie, you may notice a title in the hair and makeup department category that feels more modern than the rest: "Eyelash technician to Halle Bailey." Yes, Ariel's got eyelash extensions. Eyelash technician and makeup artist Ria Biggerstaff-Hudson was brought on once the makeup team and Bailey ultimately decided extensions made the most sense, likely due to the water scenes (versus battling with mascara or falsies).

"There is a fine balancing act between the lashes looking natural enough for when they’re blown up on the big screen, but dramatic enough to still give the leading lady a ‘wow’ factor," says Biggerstaff-Hudson. "[Halle and I] collaborated and created a classic ‘Disney Princess’ style lash, meaning we gave a beautiful flare to the outer corners, with a strong curl throughout."

Camille Friend is no stranger to the world of underwater hair design. She was nominated for an Oscar this year for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, where she worked to create the hair and wig design for many of the film's underwater scenes. Friend was brought in to work with Bailey because of her expertise in this area, as well as with Black hair design in general. After designing the hair, Friend passed Bailey's day-to-day styling duties to Tiffanne Williams.

"[Disney] brought me in to see what was going to be successful, what was going to work, and how I could make it all come together," says Friend. "You're coming together with what Halle had as her hair, which is locs, then what the filmmakers wanted to do, and then you have the third party: the character that everybody loves."

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While most of the cast had wigs created, Bailey's hair was her own. Friend worked with sketch artists to help visualize potential color and style options and consulted with Marshall to land on the perfect balance of honoring the original character but also incorporating a fresh take on Bailey's version of Ariel. Overall, it took several months to nail down the final hair design.

"Knowing that she was an African-American young lady, and not taking her out of the culture, how do we do that?" says Friend. They tested out wigs as an option, but ultimately Bailey's 23-24 inch locs did not allow for a wig to lay properly. Bailey's final look ended up being created from four shades (auburn, red-orange, and two different blondes) of custom-colored 30-inch hair from Extensions Plus, which were wrapped around Bailey's hair.

"We wrapped her [own] hair with the different colors to create more like an ombre look within her hair," says Friend. "In between the locs, we added in a loose, wavy, three, 3B/3C hair texture." The addition of the loose hair was to ensure that her hair would move freely underwater, and look just as beautiful on land.

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Outside of, you know, being a mermaid, Ariel's apple-red hair is her defining feature in the animated classic. While it was never a question that Bailey would have red hair for the live-action film, it was a matter of landing on the perfect shade. Similar to Sword King's stance on creating a character versus a caricature, Friend wanted Bailey to look her best.

"With any actress that sits in my chair, when I'm looking at a hair color, [I think] what is going to look most attractive on them?" says Friend. "The red that Ariel originally has is a very violet red and that's not a red for everyone to wear." The four-shade combination they landed on was picked because it was complementary to Bailey's skin tone and eye color. "In any kind of character that I build, I don't care if they're black, white, red, or purple, I am always looking to make sure that the actor looks the most attractive in the hair color in it," Friend says. "That's what building good characters is about."

Read more from The Scenario:

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Now watch the other Bailey sister try some new things:

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