sharlothaven asked:
Hi Neil! I'm super anxious to ask this question, because, well, Tumblr is a hellsite, but i'm going for it anyway. My girlfriend and i are already planning our Aziraphale & Crowley cosplays, but I also really loved Pollution. Now my question for you is, as i'm neither English nor American and don't know much about cultural appropriation/appreaciation, black/brownfacing etc. Can I? May I?
I would never stop anyone cosplaying – and @lourdesfaberes doesn’t actually look like Pollution in real life.
Don’t try and make yourself up to be a member of a race that you aren’t, though. That way lies misery.
Cosplay at its best seems to me about embodying the things you enjoy about a character and the way they dress and look: I have been loving the African, Filipino, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian, African-American, Japanese, Chinese and Korean Crowleys, Aziraphales and Beelzebubs* that have been showing up on Twitter, after all.
*Why Beelzebub?
Because with the casting and character design for Beelzebub, you and the rest of the Good Omens crew created a demon portrayed by a female actor who isn’t just “sexy evil lady”. That’s something so rare that I don’t think I’ve even seen it before, at least not in a live-action tv show or movie. Demons, especially ones portrayed by women, are almost always required to be sexy seductive temptresses. Beelzebub is played by a woman, and yet, they get to be fully-clothed. They get to be truly repulsive. They get a snappy suit, and yes- an awesome fuzzy hat.
I think I’m surprised because I wasn’t expecting Beelzebub to catch the imaginations of people. The fly hat was improvised. The original plan had been to give Beelzebub fly eyes, but Anna Maxwell Martin was about to have or had just had some eye problems which meant no contacts, and no glueing the big fly lenses we’d obtained onto her head. “Nosh” our hair and make up queen showed me what she had and asked my advice and I pointed out that we could turn the lenses and a couple of pieces of wire into a fuzzy fly hat, for Beelzebub on the air base. And we would have lots of face rot and flies in hell. So we did it. And it was the only time we ever got a costuming note from our execs at Amazon asking what the heck was going on with the fly hat. I assured them it would be just fine once we had a visual image of Hell Beelzebub in everyone’s mind. And flies.
Then it was just a matter of looking very fierce every time the people at the BBC told us how much money we would save by not putting the flies around Beelzebub’s head in post-production.