The Big Picture

The prosthetics designer and creator of Nadja Doll, Paul Jones, discusses bringing the hybrid animals to life in the “Hybrid Creatures” episode of What We Do in the Shadows. Jones explains the challenges of creating creatures for a show shot with handheld cameras. As prosthetics designer, Jones has freedom in designing for the characters, while keeping them grounded in reality.

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for the “Hybrid Creatures” episode of What We Do in the Shadows.]In the “Hybrid Creatures” episode (Season 5, Episode 7) of the FX comedy series What We Do in the Shadows, Laszlo (Matt Berry) has taken his experiments with Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) to a whole new level, creating hybrid animals that each have their own personality. But when the not quite human familiar, not quite a vampire Guillermo is tasked with disposing of the creatures before they’re discovered, he seeks to find a less gruesome option that he can live with.

After screening the wild and fun-filled episode, Collider got the opportunity to chat with the show’s prosthetics designer and Nadja Doll creator extraordinaire Paul Jones about bringing the hybrid animals to life, the challenges of creating creatures and prosthetics for a show that’s shot with handheld cameras, the freedom he gets to create for the characters, narrowing down the animals they could include in the episode, the evolution of Nadja Doll, the doll’s complicated Season 5 sex scene, the layer the undeniably talented cast adds with their performances, how he ended up making creatures and monsters his profession, and what’s still to come.

Collider: This is a show that embraces its weird, and I love that about it.

PAUL JONES: Yeah, I’ve definitely been embracing weird, for a few years now, so it’s perfect.

Image via FX Networks

Every time I think the show can’t possibly get weirder, it does and it continues to do so in new and very creative and imaginative ways.

JONES: Thank you. We pride ourselves on our oddness and keeping it fresh in, but it’s easy to do in a world full of these characters. You start mining and you realize that the mythology has so many layers to it. And then, as soon as you start adding the comedy, it becomes absolutely weird. It’s fantastic.

When you work on a show like this, does it feel like, if you can think it up, they will find a way to make it work?

JONES: It’s funny you say that. I’ve been on this show since episode two of Season 1, so I’ve been able to see the evolving aspect of the show, and it’s been really great to see how my shorthand has gotten shorter and shorter with the writers and with the directors. It’s almost like we read each other’s minds now. It’s very rare that I have to do more than one concept design now, when I’m designing a creature. With the hybrid animals, I did one design, which I then modified, and that was the final look of the character. We ended up having this shorthand with (showrunner) Paul [Simms]. He said to me, right off the bat, when I first started on the show, “You need to always find the funny, but stay grounded in reality. We’ll provide the craziness, but we need the creatures to look like they’re alive. We don’t want to make them look ridiculous.”

Now, having said that, with our hybrids, when you have a lamb that has a prosthetic body with huge ears and a bouffant of hair to match one of our leading actors, you can’t help but think it’s ridiculous. But at the same time, we try to make the coloration and the hair patterns and everything be loyal to the actual breed of creature that we were using. So, for the frogs, we used frog coloring to paint them. For the lambs, we used reference pictures of real lambs. Same with the dog. Same with the rat. We used your animal elements, and then threw in where we thought the human elements would work. Giving a rat baby fingers is something you never would expect to do in a show, but I think we pulled that off pretty well. And then, we get to do characters like Binky, which is just an out-and-out odd-looking creature. It’s not a fish, and it’s not a person. It actually reminded me a little bit of the opening to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, with the fish in the tank. That was how I originally saw it. We just took it a little bit more into the amphibian rather than a fish.

How did you figure out how much of Guillermo to have in each one of them?

JONES: Originally, when I first read the script, I just assumed that we were gonna put Harvey [Guillén] in all these makeups and shoot them separately, and then comp him into the scene because it was a hybrid of his character. But then, we thought, “Well, that’s just not practical. We can’t spread him that thin.” So, we decided to keep the essence of Harvey, and that’s when the designs took on a more animalistic approach rather than more human. The original design was literally half Harvey’s face and half an animal’s face, and it had a very asymmetrical look to it. But we felt that would be distracting from all the crazy humor that they were providing in the dialogue. So, we went back to making them more animal, and then just kept Harvey in the performance.

Image via FX Networks

Were there more animals that you talked about, that couldn’t ultimately be made? Do some great ideas just not translate well, when you’re trying to create them?

JONES: Exactly. In the original script, we knew we wanted a frog because it was just a nice way to start with something small and gross. We knew we wanted a rat. We knew we wanted a dog. But then, they talked about maybe a lizard that had cat elements mixed with Harvey. They were talking about taking two animals and combining them, and then having Harvey in the middle, but we felt that just looked too busy. We wanted to keep it simple and make them identifiable. They are clones of Harvey and the animal that he’s been cloned with, however ridiculous that is.

What direction or guidelines were you given initially, when it came to this? Are you at a point where you have total freedom in figuring out what could be best to create because they know the work you do and trust that, or were you given any specifics to follow?

JONES: It was a much bigger list. One of the best compliments I’ve ever had came up in a meeting. It was a question of, how are we gonna do that? And [Paul Simms] just said, “Paul’s doing that. Moving on.” That was the best because that’s the level we’re at now. He has complete trust in me to come up with something that works in the way they film the show. The show itself is all handheld, so we don’t have the luxury of editing to help me with some of my effects. Generally, everything we create has to be self-contained. There can’t be cables coming out of it. There can’t be other elements that we have to bring into the shop halfway through. It has to be completely self-contained. So, the original list of animals was about 20 animals. I read the script and I was like, “Paul, this is great. I can’t wait to do this in two years time, when I finish everything.” And he was like, “I knew you’d say that. Okay, how many do you think we can get away with? How many would you like to do?” So, we paired it down to about six, which we felt wouldn’t overwhelm the scene because our sets aren’t that big. They’re rooms of a house. If you put 20 hybrid animals in there, there’s no room for the actors. And we knew we needed a certain amount of puppetry, just to keep it away from the person wearing a costume, but we knew we could do a lot with prosthetics, as well. That’s when we came down to the final list of animals.

I noticed that we not only see the hybrids at night and inside, but we also see them during the day. Did that affect the design? Did you have to create the animals to make sure that they would look good during the day, as well as in any kind of lighting?

JONES: The beauty and curse of this show is the handheld element. We never really stay on anything that long. We’re moving around so much. So, I knew I could take what was essentially prosthetic makeups and get away with a little bit more than what you would be able to do, say on The Avengers or something like that, where you get these big close-ups. Our show is a frenetic handheld mockumentary. That doesn’t mean we’re not gonna put the work into the characters, but it means that, if the camera does see them, it’s there, even though it doesn’t necessarily pick it up, every single time. So, So going into the old folks’ home, we knew the camera would be moving and the creatures would be moving, so I wasn’t so worried about the work, even though me and my team had put all the bells and whistles in there.

Image via FX Networks

Once you saw how everything would look, as it came together with the performances, did you have a favorite hybrid?

JONES: Yeah, I think the rat is my favorite, only because it’s so ridiculous. The performers we had playing the dog, the lamb and the pig were so convincing, as characters, once the makeup went on, that I didn’t worry so much about those because I knew that the performer would bring it to life. A puppet is always touch and go because there’s no person inside it. The rat was only so log, so I knew that would be a lot more of a challenge. It turned out that was actually the easiest thing to do because it was so bloody ridiculous looking. It was covered in pubic hair and it had baby arms. It was ridiculous, so we knew that, no matter what we did, it was gonna work. And then, we had the visual effects team tweak it and bring it completely to life, like they do with our doll. The doll is like 95% me, except for the mouth. That’s entirely VFX. So, I knew going in that using that effect with the rat and with Binky was gonna work and it would completely come to life.

When you created the Nadja doll, could you ever have imagined that it would become as big a part of the show as it has and that it would be loved by as many people as it is?

JONES: I think that’s a lot to do with Natasia [Demetriou]’s performance, as well as the fact that it’s so ridiculous. No one’s ever had a tiny childlike doll be as abusive and sarcastic and offensive as our character is. That’s the charm of the character. But the funny thing about our puppet is that it was written for one episode. We brought it out, filmed it, it got edited and sent off to Disney, and they said, “This puppet’s great. Can we have it in the next episode?” And then, that happened with the next episode, and the next episode. It’s turned into a series regular, which has been great for my puppeteers because they’re in every week, doing this doll. But that doll was built for one episode, and it’s been running for three seasons now. Every season, I have to pull the doll out and give her a full service. All the servos have to be checked, all her eyes have to be checked, the arms, the legs, and the wig placement. Everything has to be refurbished because I didn’t think it would need to last this long. Luckily, we built it better than I realized, so she’s still going strong, after five full seasons.

Did you get a sense, instantly on set, that the doll wouldn’t be going anywhere, anytime soon?

JONES: Initially, with got the reaction from Kyle [Newacheck], the director of that episode, who was like, “Dude, this is great. We can do loads with this. I thought it would just be a prop, but this is a character.” That’s the beauty of it. And Natasia is in love with the doll. Why wouldn’t you be? To a point where, at the end of last season, we made her, her own doll. She actually got to take a doll home with her. She’s been asking for it since Season 2, I just haven’t had time to build her one. But the end of Season 5, we actually gave her, her own doll. It’s not the one we use in the show. It’s her own version. Our hero dolly will never leave my workshop. It really is beloved. I have people email me every week saying, “Where can I get one of these dolls?” And I’m like, “Give Disney a call. I’m sure they can build you one.”

Image via FX Networks

I’m surprised there isn’t some version being sold as merchandising.

JONES: Yeah. It’s hit-and-miss because the people that want it, want it really badly. But does everybody want a creepy doll in the corner of their bedroom?

I very much do, but I’m also weird.

JONES: That’s funny. I’ve got a weird ass collection because of my job. I do monster movies half the time, so I’ve got severed hands and body parts, and all kinds of stuff. Our workshop is almost a museum of everything we’ve built on the show. We built the cursed hat for the show. We built the dolly. We’ve built human replicas of pretty much all our characters. It really is a bizarre thing to go walking around this workshop.

How much fun is it to have something like the doll, where it’s evolving and you’re developing it, on an ongoing basis while the series is still being made? The hybrids are all really cool, but you do those for one episode. So, what’s it like to have something that you get to keep building on?

JONES: It’s nice because you really feel like you’re part of the cast. I do movies where the creature is always a special effect. It’s very rare that I get to create a character that just has to sit in the scene and look grumpy. With prosthetics, you create them for a reason and you feature them. Either they’re killing coeds, or they’re destroying the universe. You’re creating these things for a purpose, With the dolly, she just exists. People just take her for granted. There’s no, “Oh, my God, a talking doll.” Of course, it’s a talking doll. It’s Nadja doll. She’s in the family portraits. I’ve had that three times now. We brought the Baron back and he’s become a series regular. The wonderful and amazingly talented Doug Jones is a pleasure to work with, on every season. He was just in the pilot episode, and then they wait, “Hey, maybe we can bring Doug back. Yeah, let’s bring Doug back.” And then, the Sire was built for one episode, for when they go find him. But now, every time we see the Baron, we see the Sire. They’re recurring characters, and they’re in the family portrait above the fireplace. That has been a real thrill for me, to know that I’m not only involved in the show and part of the team, but I’m also creating part of the legacy of the show, rather than just doing something behind the scenes. It feels that way with every department, from art direction to costumes to props. We’re all creating the legacy of the show, rather than just working on the show.

Image via FX Networks

I was delighted by the moment this season where the Nadja doll dances like one of those dolls that you push the button on, on Halloween. That was hilarious.

JONES: That was pretty funny. The great thing about that was that it was entirely practical. The only thing that didn’t work was the button. But all the movements, I switched her on, and then she started moving. It was her head on a whole new body, which we then were able to remove and put her old body back on, for later scenes.

What was your reaction to learning that you would have to figure out how to do a sex scene with the doll?

JONES: You just go with it. You go, “Okay. Yeah. Why not? This is the show. Of course, we’re gonna have a sex scene with the doll.” In fact, my suggestion was to build a miniature whip for her, so she’s actually whipping Matt [Berry] while he’s doing the deed. That was actually my suggestion. I’m just in for a penny, in for a pound, at this point. This show is definitely filthy. That was a particularly crazy post-credit sequence. That’s as far as we’ve gone so far in the show, but we’re still evolving, so who knows? That was crazy. We had Mark [Proksch] in a full Natasia suit, and Natasia in a Mark head. We shot the scene twice, with both the actors in the same position. Natasia was on her back with her legs in the air, with Mark’s face on her back. And then, we put Mark bent over the table with his legs removed and fake Natasia legs bolted to the table and a fake head of hers on the back, with his arms hidden and her arms going backwards. It was a whole thing. It was way more work than what the payoff was, but it was so worth it on set. How could you not have fun with that on set? It was ridiculous. Plus, our cast is just as much fun off camera as they are on camera. It’s a real absurd camaraderie, at this point.

There are not a lot of actors that could sell some of the stuff that they have to sell on this show.

JONES: Absolutely. Nobody delivers a line of filth quite like Matt Berry. No one delivers a naive line quite like Kayvan, as Nandor. Mark is an icon unto himself. Can you imagine anybody else in that role? Can you imagine anybody other than Natasia as Nadja? They’ve made these roles their own, and every week they stay true to character, but it just gets expanded and expanded and expanded. It’s just wonderful.

Image via FX Networks

What was it that drew you to this line of work? It seems like the most fun, but it also seems like a very specialized field. Was there a specific inspiration that got you to where you are now?

JONES: I think it’s an equal mix of loving monsters and loving art. I’ve been doing this professionally since I was 18 and I’m 55 now, so it’s been a while. But as a hobby, I’ve been doing this since I was 13. The real eye-opening day was when I realized that those two completely separate desires and ambitions of mine actually became one when Making Of stuff started coming out. I think Star Wars was the first behind the scenes video, back in the seventies., where they showed artists sculpting aliens. I was like, “There’s a job for this?” So, it became a hobby, which became a profession, which became a vocation. This is the only job I’ve ever done. I worked in fast food for 18 days, when I was in art college. That’s it. Since the eighties, this is all I’ve ever done, as a paying career.

I’ve always loved and been fascinated by monsters, creatures, Muppets, Fraggles, and anything stop-motion.

JONES: It’s stop-motion that started my interest in this type of genre. It was Ray Harryhausen, Jason and the Argonauts, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Those are the movies that made me realize that fantasy and horror were my bag. I was lucky to have a certain amount of artistic ability, as a child, so the two found each other, very early on. I’ve just been lucky. I’ve had some great opportunities. It’s just nice, in the twilight years of my career, that I’m able to work on this show, which has been the cherry on the top of my career. I don’t see myself stopping any time soon, and I certainly don’t want to stop working on this show. It’s just a dream come true.

Is there anything that you’ve done, further down the line on the series, that fans should look out for and can look forward to? Is there anything that you can tease, down the road?

JONES: Yeah, the show is not over yet. The whole process with Harvey’s character is an ongoing storyline. So, be prepared. There will be some other things popping up. It’s What We Do in the Shadows, after all.

What We Do in the Shadows airs on Thursday nights on FX and is available to stream at Hulu.