Despite exploring some ugly, violent material, HBO’s Sharp Objects is damn beautiful to look at. Director Jean-Marc Vallée gives the series an elegant, sun-baked visual palette, and the settings are rich with character and detail. That, too, goes for star Amy Adams’ body, which, due to the numerous words she’s carved into her own skin, has provided some of the show’s most striking images. And, like everything else on the show, those intricate carvings were designed with the utmost care and consideration.
One of the most stunning takeaways from Vulture’s new chat with the show’s makeup effects department head Adrien Morot and Adams’ makeup artist Kate Biscoe was that each of the 350(!) words on her body was done in approximations of Adams’ own handwriting. They even took into consideration “an amount of distortion in her writing” to reflect the difficulty of carving words into her back while looking into a mirror, as well as the myriad instruments used to make these cuts, from knives, to needles to razors. That…sounds really hard.