Many people are aware that the so-called “fairy tales” by the Brothers Grimm, in their original forms, are arguably more for horror fans than for small children: The stories are full of monsters, murders and dismemberment. NBC’s series GRIMM—whose first season hit DVD and Blu-ray this week and which begins its second season next Monday, August 13—maintains this tradition with the help of makeup designer/creator Barney Burman.

The show’s hero, Portland, Oregon detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli), learns that he is a hereditary Grimm, one of a rare breed of people born to see the true nature of “Wesen,” creatures of various supernatural species that can take on human form (like the Mauvais Dentes pictured below, from the new season’s premiere episode). Like Portland’s truly human residents, the Wesen sometimes commit or are the victims of crime. The audience sees what Nick sees, so the episodes are full of monsters—and often, they’re messy killers, so we all witness badly mauled, skinned and/or chewed corpses.

In charge of these shocking sights is Burman, one of the Burman makeup dynasty: “My dad’s dad made the prosthetic nose and the cane for THE WOLF MAN with Lon Chaney Jr., and made the pieces for Jack Pierce.” Although it’s where he wound up, Burman says he didn’t initially plan to enter the family business. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be Lon Chaney; I wanted to do the makeups on myself and then perform in them. I pushed acting a lot for many years, so makeup was just my fallback, a way to make money. Then at some point, I said, ‘Hey, I’m actually doing well with this and making money and enjoying it, and the pursuit of acting is not so enjoyable,’ so I just decided to switch my focus and do this as well as I could. And hopefully, it’s being appreciated, which makes me happy.”

Burman joined GRIMM during preparation for its third episode. Before his arrival, Burman explains, “Andrew Clement [who created the new Freddy for the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET remake] did the pilot, and he did an excellent job and I respect his art greatly. And then, for whatever reason—I have no idea why—they decided to go a different way for the run of the series and went to somebody else for episode two, and let’s just say that didn’t work out so well. Then they came to me, so I started as of episode three.”

Fango is speaking to Burman next to a GRIMM makeup FX demo booth set up in the corner of an elegant Pasadena hotel, where NBC is having an all-day press event. There are prosthetics for creatures in various stages of completion, plus a body missing its skin. The corpse is from the  “Tarantella” episode, which features a Spinnetod (played by ANGEL’s Amy Acker, pictured left), a spiderlike Wesen who is compelled to mate with human males in order to suspend her rapid aging process. “This is the aftermath of what happens to somebody once she’s drained them of their liquefied innards,” Burman explains.

Regarding the look of the predatory Spinnetod, Burman says, “Happily, for that episode, they kept it minimal. We just did a little bit of patterning on her face, black eyes and some teeth, and it played really well—more than just trying to give somebody a spider face, which would be almost impossible to pull off. And then she had these very long, creepy, kind of spider-y arms. Basically, like a spider, she mates and then kills her mate.”

Then there are the remains of the unfortunate victim. “That’s silicone,” Burman explains. “It’s actually a store-bought plastic skeleton; we have precious little time to make these, so we got a skeleton, cut it all up and rigged it so it was floppy the way we wanted it. We constructed muscles out of mattress foam, made big sheets of silicone skins and wrapped it over the armature we made.”

Burman’s booth is also haunted by a Murcielago—pronounced “mur-see-ay-la-go”—a batlike Wesen (pictured right) who at first denies he has anything to do with GRIMM. “I’m with hotel management,” the creature protests. “I’m from the third floor.” This beast appears in the “Happily Ever Aftermath” episode; today, he’s played by Burman’s actor friend Jim Nieb, who has a real flair for working the makeup, as well as startling people who aren’t expecting to see a man-sized bat at what is otherwise a relatively sedate affair.

With both a fully realized Wesen and a screen-ready corpse on view, Burman considers the question of whether it’s more difficult to make a creature or a ravaged body. “I don’t know if one is more challenging than the other,” he muses. “I enjoy doing both. I would say that the most challenging one is whatever they want to shoot first, because often [the makeup is required on set] on day one or day two, and I’ve got four or five days to build a dead body or a creature or whatever we have to do. So I’m always trying to get them to push my stuff toward the end, but they can’t program the show completely around what works for me, so I have to hustle—along with a very talented crew, I might add.”

One of Burman’s favorite GRIMM creatures, he says, was part of “the very first episode we worked on, even though it wasn’t the very first one to air, called ‘The Three Bad Wolves’ [pictured left]. We had to do a pig-man [face] on Danny Roebuck. Danny’s fantastic to begin with, but I’d always wanted to do a pig-man makeup, so I was very excited about that. I really liked the way this bat creature came out, and I liked the ogre. Some of them, I don’t know. I can’t say if there’s any formula to it, but some of them I just gravitate more toward.”

On GRIMM, the Wesen characters often appear human throughout much of a scene, then flash to their true natures, then back to human form. It would clearly be time-prohibitive to make actors up for a single shot and then have to clean them off to do the rest of the scene, and Burman relates how he and his crew handle this situation. “How long you see somebody as a creature will dictate whether they just do a CG morph or we use an actor, or sometimes a stuntman in a creature makeup. Sometimes, when it’s very quick, they just do the CG morph and let that be it, but if there’s a fight, if there’s action, they have dialogue, there are other things that will dictate it being a makeup, and sometimes that’ll be the actor in makeup, or sometimes it’ll be a stunt person in the makeup and the actor doesn’t necessarily become a creature.

“That works out much better scheduling-wise, rather than putting an actor into makeup for three, three-and-a half hours. They just have the stunt guy made up and do the morph back and forth. On certain episodes, like ‘Big Feet,’ we had both actor and stuntman in a Bigfoot makeup. We had the stuntman running around doing all the big stuff, the wide shots, and they would come in and get a few shots of the actor [in the Bigfoot makeup] one day, and then out of the makeup another day.”

Over the course of Burman’s career, there have been huge advances in makeup FX, and some have proven especially useful on a tight weekly television series schedule. “Silicone, and the development of that into a proper material for prosthetics, has been tremendously helpful to me,” Burman observes. “I like using it; it looks better and there’s a much faster turnaround when you’re casting something. You don’t have to slam it into the mold and bake it for three to five hours and then find out if it works. You can open it in, like, an hour and see how the piece is. For me, it’s much easier to cast something in silicone than in foam latex. But foam still has its place. If soemthing’s big enough, you need the light weight of foam, because silicone has heaviness to it. But I’m always sort of pushing that limit, to see how much silicone I can put on somebody before they start to get a bad back,” he laughs.

As he’s also an actor, is there any possibility that Burman may show up on GRIMM in one of his Wesen makeups? He laughs again. “I think about that now and then, but I’m not ever going to insert myself into anything just for the sake of it, just to appease my own ego. But if the right thing came up, I might throw my name in.”

GRIMM is filmed on location in Portland, requiring Burman to commute between there and his base in Los Angeles, and says productions in either locale are fairly similar. “It’s different for me because I have to travel back and forth a lot,” he notes. “It’s really beautiful up there, and I like it. But I don’t know how different it is. Shooting all over the world is still shooting; it’s still the same basic structure. Theirs is sometimes an attitude, different vibes, and I’d say the vibe on this show is really easygoing, very nice. Across the board, this crew is one of the very best I’ve ever worked with. On set, my main guy is Stevie Bettles. He is invaluable. Nick Reisinger has been running my shop, and those guys, among many others, are sort of the backbone of all this and keep it going.”

Burman concludes, “I’m really privileged to be able to work on a show that has this much whimsical creative gravitas to it, if you will.”

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features