The Little Mermaid gets dragged for bad drag, makeup artist responds

“The Little Mermaid looks weird” is a common criticism of the uncanny valley fishies that populate Disney’s latest live-action experiment. (Trust, the naysaying is not slowing the movie down at the box office.) One doesn’t expect that criticism to be wielded at the regular, non-CGI human faces. And yet.

A featurette posted to Disney’s Twitter showing a time lapse of Melissa McCarthy in the makeup chair becoming Ursula drew negative attention earlier this month, leading some users to advocate for queer artists to be the ones wielding the makeup brush. The response isn’t so facile as gay people do makeup good; it’s a reaction specific to Ursula because the character’s original design was based on the drag queen Divine. RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Kerri Colby wrote that the video is “absolutely why we should hire up and coming queer artists with a pulse on the present and a vision for the future more often.” Drag Race Down Under alum Art Simone retweeted the clip with the joke, “When you lie on your resume and end up with the job.”

These digs made their way back to Little Mermaid makeup artist Peter Smith King, who said he found them “offensive”: “Why can’t I do as good a job as a queer makeup artist?” He questioned in an interview with Insider.

Objectively, the video circulating Twitter is not the best example of King’s work. Most notably, the eyebrows are askew, and the bright colors painted on McCarthy’s eyes and lips are plastered on without much finesse. (“Now I start getting really subtle,” King jokes before applying the green eyeshadow.) That clip is particularly unforgiving, though, and the look comes across much better in the context of the film.

King called the online backlash “ridiculous,” saying, “That’s trying to claim it and that’s fine, if that’s what they wanna do, but don’t put people down because they’re not what they want it to be.” He added, “I personally don’t get it. Yes, I’m very old now, so that’s fine, I get that too, but, you know, a makeup artist or makeup designer could design makeup, they don’t have to have an attachment to the nature of what they’re doing.”

King’s assertion that his take on Ursula isn’t based on “any drag acts at all” or even on the animated version of Ursula doesn’t exactly hold water, however. The bright red lips and high, arching brows are present in the animated version, and that kind of exaggerated makeup is a staple of drag performance. King even told Insider he and McCarthy “laughed about how much we love drag queens and drag makeup and stuff.” The design obviously wasn’t created in a vacuum. In any case, we know that Disney’s live actions don’t have to look good or even be good to make boatloads of money, so the point is rather moot.