9 Mind-Blowing Secrets from the Dallas Buyers Club Make-up Artist

2. She has some very cool tricks up her sleeve.

"One of my favorite things to do is a lot of research, and talk to the actors, and discuss what subtle things we can do that will make a difference. One is John Cusack, in The Paperboy, he played a murderous killer who lives in a swamp. People would look at him on set, even the crew members, and would get an uncomfortable feeling—you couldn't figure out what was going on. I had him wear one black contact in his eye. He had one light brown eye, and one super dark brown eye. You couldn't tell what was going on, you just knew something wasn't right about him."

3. She has never met the real Jared Leto, as he stayed in character as Rayon for the entire shoot. Even when getting his eyebrows waxed off!

"I have no idea what Jared Leto is like. He was in the make-up chair five, sometimes six hours a day, back and forth, but even spending that much time in a tiny trailer, he never dropped it... I'll tell you a funny story. She sat down in the makeup chair, and we're just kind of getting to know each other, and I ask, 'What do you think about waxing off all of your eyebrows?' And she said, 'Well yes, I've already waxed my entire body, so let's do it!' I didn't quite have her confidence yet, she was still trying to figure me out. So I heat up the wax, put it on her brows, and go, 'Okay, I'm going to do this in one fell swoop!' Jared Leto, as a person, has really nice eyebrows. So I go to rip it off, and she grabs my arm and says in Southern woman's voice, 'Try to make it quick!' Luckily, they came off in one fell swoop, and I had her confidence after that."

4. Jared Leto's interpretation of his character influenced the make-up.

"I wasn't sure where we were going to go with her until she showed up on set and I got to meet her, and I quickly realized she is, you know, a drug addict and a hustler, but that is not the main thing about her. She is an amazing hot mess that still reaches for fabulousness in her mind at all times. She knows who she is. That's when we started having a lot of fun... I thought she'd be influenced by actresses of the '60s, because that's when her mom was in her hey day. I'd bring pictures of Brigitte Bardot, and Twiggy, Samantha from Bewitched. And she'd be influenced by stars of the 1980s, so I'd bring Dolly Parton, Pat Benatar. I'd ask, 'What do you think of this today?'"

5. The movie was shot in around three weeks, and the actors would have to be different levels of ill multiple times a day.

"We shot the film in 23 days. It was so quick. Additionally, there was no sitting around. The director shoots without lighting, so the camera is always ready to roll. We had a lot of makeup changes; the schedule would call for their unhealthiest look, then a 25lb weight gain with their healthiest look. Sometimes they'd switch back and forth five times in a single day."

7. She researched with an AIDs expert to depict every level of the illness.

"I researched with a wonderful doctor, Dr. David Hardy, who was the head of infectious diseases at the National Institute of Health. He sent photos and we spent a lot of time on the phone talking about the physical effects of full-blown AIDS, the different stages. Patients get really skeletal in the face, that's probably the number one. They lose a lot of muscle mass everywhere. They develop a rash, almost like a rosacea or psoriasis, with yellow pustules. And of course they get lesions, and those happen all over the body. Matthew and I jumped in together. Both he and Jared were advocates of the process the whole way through. We really sat down together and made a breakdown of when he goes from one level of sickness to another level of sickness."

8. Making someone look like they're dying of AIDS takes a lot of make-up.

"The first stage of what I would do is make them pale, with makeup product all over their entire bodies to make them pale. Then I would go in and contour all the bones in the face, especially underneath the cheekbones, to make the temples recess, to make their eyeballs look sunken in. The next level of sickness would be to highlight these contours to make the bones look even more protruding. The bones that I couldn't see, I would look at reference photos of skulls and I'd draw them in with makeup, so we did see them. I would highlight and contour veins in the face, because if you have no fat then your veins poke out. Of course, making the rash and lesions was the final stage."