100 Interviews

#81: NICK WOLFE - “A horror make-up artist.”

I take the train an hour into Brooklyn to meet Nick Wolfe at his girlfriend Athena’s apartment.

The pair have been running ragged all week because Halloween is prime time for horror make-up artists. Nick shows me some photos on his camera of a girl he painted last night to look like ‘Batman’ villain Poison Ivy. He and Athena did themselves up as Frankenstein and the bride of Frankenstein in impressively elaborate make-up, of course.

Nick and his twin brother Brian are some of the best known body painting artists in the field. They got their start together in 1998 working for Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights, an annual event I attended as a high school-er growing up in Florida. The aim is a fun evening of haunted houses and scares around every corner but I never went back after my first go because the whole thing gave me unneeded anxiety. (I am truly no fun, guys.)

Growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, the brothers had always been interested in monsters. In middle school, Nick and Brian would recreate scary movies in their backyard together. Younger twin Nick is still obsessed with Godzilla, stemming from a childhood love of dinosaurs. (“A fire-breathing dinosaur? Uh, yes!”) It’s a fact his girlfriend semi-laments; she tried to get him a Godzilla action figure as a gift but he told her he had all of them.

“Godzilla is king,” he says. “There are 28 Godzilla movies, not counting the American version so really, there are 29 Godzilla movies. How can you not be a fan of that?”

The brothers were also always artists, drawing as far back as they can remember. They figured they could marry the two and become horror movie make-up artists but ultimately that career path required moving to Hollywood, something neither brother could afford.

The breaking point came when they were 29 years old and flat broke. Nick was a college drop-out and both were working uninspired day jobs when they met the group Nick calls “the face painters” after getting work at nearby Universal Studios for the Halloween season.

“It was a group of 12 people, all girls and one gay guy, and so they had the girlie face painting down but their guy stuff was just terrible. A skeleton was like basic white face with black lines like Jack Skellington and the zombie was just brown and green smears,” he says. “We were like, ‘Can we do something different?’”

They were given five minutes or less with each “client” (mostly tourists who came through the park) so they took to practicing on themselves or each other, critiquing their work and then starting over. By the end of five years working at Universal Studio, Nick had skeleton faces down pat. They were creating 80 to 100 monsters a day, but they needed to push themselves further.

“The face painters said, ‘You know you can have Halloween 365 days a year, right?’” he recalls, “We were like, ‘What? There’s a 365 day a year Halloween job?”

Plus, for the twins, working with tourists ultimately had its perks — photos of the brothers’ work spread like wildfire throughout the international face painting community. For a bit, they worked painting naked women for an Internet porn site, their first foray into painting full bodies. (Nick has done the Playboy Mansion four times by now, and painting naked ladies is old hat.) The Wolfes eventually published a face painting book through Universal Studios in five languages.

“It was natural publicity,” Nick says. “In five years, everybody knew who we were. At our first con, we were signing autographs.”

Impressive for a mainly pre-Internet and definitely pre-Facebook age.

Now in his early 40s, Nick works out of Orlando, but travels constantly doing workshops and conventions — body painting as well as themed, such as Star Wars. After he leaves New York, he’ll fly to Omaha and then to Australia for two weeks to teach.

Personality-wise, Nick is friendly and smart. He reminds me of someone my father would be friends with; not because of age at all but more in the sense that he looks like a bro but talks like a hippie. He’s a captivating speaker even if he is a bit distracted painting Athena into a zombie. Athena is, as I touched on before, a make-up artist in her own right. Though she got her start just three years ago, her work is impressive too.

Athena, who hails from the Ukraine and has an accent to prove it, speaks up just as much as Nick during our interview. She’s a thin blond without a self conscious bone in her body - aside from make-up work, she also performs as “New York’s #1 Britney Spears impersonator” as well as doing shows as Lady Gaga. In the hour I spend with her and Nick, she wears a school girl outfit inspired by a Fuse network Spears special, and then no shirt at all - seemingly confused when I ask her permission to film her in her bra. It’s clear from their interactions that Nick adores her. (“I just wanted to get my paintbrush on my girlfriend,” he says when I ask what the zombie get up will be used for.)

As he paints, I ask Nick why, as an artist, body painting appeals to him more than say, a cloth canvas or painting landscapes.

“I want to create monsters,” he says, “The best thing for me is to turn people into monsters. They’re a canvas that’s moving.”

The body painting world is a small, yet global community. Once the Wolfes started making a name for themselves, they became sensations with admirers flocking to their workshops. From then on, both brothers knew they couldn’t go back to day jobs.

“When somebody tells you you’re the absolute best in the world at something, why would you ever want to do anything else?” Nick asks.

The community is also very close knit and mostly consists of women. When Athena and Nick - who knew each other from the scene for a while first - got together a year ago, (crazily enough, while working at the Playboy Mansion) their face-painting friends cheered.

“Everyone’s been so supportive of this relationship,” he says. “Because most of them don’t have face-painting husbands at home. They have normal husbands and they think, ‘Oh, that’d be awesome to bring her along.’”

Athena adds that it’s been helpful to their long-distance relationship because whenever they want to see each other, they just have to book their partner for a painting gig. This part of the conversation resonates with me full force; aside from my boyfriend living four hours away in Boston, he is also the first fellow comedian I’ve seriously dated. When we made ourselves “Facebook Official” (as my 18-year-old sister would say), our comedy friends’ heads “‘sploded with happiness.” (Direct quote.)

Athena says it’s good to be dating another body painter because they can paint on each other. “Sometimes it’s good for the painter to get painted every once in a while, to remember what they need on the other side,” she says. It’s, I think, unknowingly insightful.

Nick and I then talk about the natural competition between siblings, which Nick says probably drove he and his brother to be as successful as they are. The two are mainly self-taught aside from some prosthetics workshops offered at Universal. Nick says they take inspiration from each other and egg each other to work harder.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh you’re a natural,’ but the natural thing is to have a passion for monsters and for make-up and for art and for beauty but it’s that passion that leads to practicing,” he says.

We also talk about the professionalism needed when painting on women’s breasts (Athena nonchalantly offers to let Nick paint hers while I sit there but he sweetly tells her they deserve more of his time.) A good artist can make a girl forget she is naked, Athena says.

“I love making pretty girls look like monsters,” Nick says. “They’ve been hot their whole lives. Giving them a glimpse of the dark side is great.”

There’s also another allure to body painting — it’s inherently temporary in an art world bent on conservation and timelessness. (Think conventional museums.) Where one used to pay a photographer to capture a sunset, one can now Google image search “sunset” and cut out the artistic middle man. But for a body painter, each work is one of a kind, each canvas (or body) is unique.

“It’s the last frontier where you can be original,” Nick says. “You have to jump on it and shoot it now because then the art work is gone, like a sandcastle.”

“The canvas is the same, but the timeline is different,” Athena adds.

I ask if Nick thinks he and Brian will ever go out to Hollywood and get into movies (even though they’ve become successful independently) and he says no. (“Who’s your favorite movie horror make-up artist?” he asks. When I can’t think of one, he says, “Exactly.)

He and Brian also read a lot of self-help books and Nick believes his work is balancing out the destruction done by terrorists and other war-mongerers in the world. It’s a bit of a stretch for me mentally, but he explains: “Our job is to make people happy and to let them live out their fantasies. That’s the balance.”

“Like in the musical ‘Rent,’ I venture, “There’s a quote, ‘The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.’”

Nick smiles, putting the finishing touches on what looked to my laymen’s eyes like an effortless job turning Athena’s body into a green and black zombie ribcage.

“I’ve never seen that show but yeah, yeah, exactly,” he says. “It’s nice to have a job that lets me inspire and teach people while seeking praise and feeding my ego.”