Laura Montgomery (‘What We Do in the Shadows’ costume designer) on ‘mind-blowing’ Emmy win: We’re a ‘vampire comedy show!’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“What We Do in the Shadows” costume designer Laura Montgomery still can’t believe she’s an Emmy winner. In Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts panel, she calls her Best Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes victory from September “surreal and surprising” and adds, “It was just really nice to be recognized in that group [of nominees] as a 22-minute vampire comedy show! It’s kind of still mind-blowing to me.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
As she reveals, “We’re shooting Season 5 right now, so the show really feels like a family. A win or a nomination for any department feels like a win for everyone. We really recognize the fact that we’re all being recognized. People watch the show because of the writing and the performances and the production design — all of it kind of comes together.”
What keeps Montgomery coming back to FX’s horror-comedy show year after year? “We’re always hoping for something new to, pardon the pun, sink our teeth into,” she smiles. In Season 4, the vampire nightclub became a huge undertaking for the costume department. She notes, “The vampires’ styles don’t ever change, so to have the opportunity for them to open a nightclub is like, okay great, now it’s a whole new door of costumes that we’ve never seen before, they’ve never worn, they haven’t owned. We can kind of like break the mold a little bit.” As it turns out, many of the nightclub looks were inspired by New York, 90s club kids, and “a lot of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.'”
Nandor and Marwa’s wedding in Episode 6 was “a big episode,” Montgomery recalls. “When we got the script for that episode, we were already up to our eyeballs in ‘Night Market,’ which was the episode with the supernatural night market that had cast changes, creatures, day players and background for this whole expansive world.” In addition to the wedding ceremony, she also had to create costumes for the “makeover montage” with “two vampires and one character who is a charred legless torso with one moveable arm and one arm fused to his body … it was so much fun to do.”
Even though “What We Do in the Shadows” clocks in at 22 minutes per episode, there are enough costume changes for a feature film. “Because it’s shot in documentary format, there are often flashbacks and there are talking heads,” she begins, “and for the talking heads it’s not reality-style where they have the same costume all the time, it’s documentary-style so whenever they cut to a talking head interview, it’s different clothes. So it’s a lot of costumes!”
Also in our exclusive video interview, Montgomery talks about the Baby Colin Robinson character (played by Mark Proksch) and how his wardrobe was so wild because “he’s kind of growing up unsupervised … with access to all kinds of weird clothes from victims in the mansion.”
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