MacKinnon: Familiar Aliens In Season Two Of Discovery
2 min read
James MacKinnon, who is the Department Head of Prosthetic and Special F/X Makeup for Star Trek: Discovery, spoke to TrekMovie about bringing back familiar characters and about aliens.
“I can’t say much [about Season Two], but we get to have a little more growth on the characters; we get a little backstory on some characters; we get to bring some characters back from previous shows; which I will not say which ones,” said MacKinnon. “We get to delve into a little bit of the past and the present, and establishing more with the characters, makeup-wise, prosthetic-wise.”
MacKinnon was asked if he could tell fans about which aliens would be seen this season but, as usual for those working on Discovery; he couldn’t give a lot in the way of details due to the desire to not spoil the season. “Nope,” he said. “Nope. But it’s a cool amount. It’s a great thing because I’ve done five of the other television shows back from Deep Space Nine, Voyager, First Contact, so it’s kind of cool as a makeup artist to be able to… not reinvent, a little bit, so if we bring one of those makeups back again, I get to do it for a second time, and maybe it’s new products, so say back in 1990, there was all foam latex, today it’s silicone.
“So it’s a new medium; it’s a new makeup; it’s washes instead of PAX paints; which is the product we used back then. So I get to be challenged as a makeup artist now to kind of create a new version of what I created back then with Michael Westmore on one of the shows.”
Does MacKinnon have a favorite character to make up on Discovery? “I would have to say – I mean, Doug [Jones as Saru] is amazing, just because he’s a new creature to the solar system, to the show as well.”
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