Ayla Ruby
Isis Mussenden is the costume designer for Lawman: Bass Reeves and was charged with helping transport the audience back to the American West in the 19th century. Over Zoom, the talented artist who also worked on Masters of Sex and The Wheel of Time talked the progression of costumes for David Oyelowo’s Bass (Oyelowo interviewed by Joey here) and more.
She shared what it was like working on that opening scene for the series, where there were hundreds of period-costumed background performers.(But that turned out to be just a fraction of the 5,000 they would dress for the whole series!) Mussenden talked about the costume differences between Esme (Joaquina Kalukango) and Jenny (Lauren E. Banks) and how those helped reveal the story in the show. It was an interesting chat. Read ahead for the full interview, or listen to the audio above.
Ayla Ruby: Yeah, so I’m very excited to chat. I’d love to talk about your journey to this project. What made you want to sign on and had you heard of Bass Reeves before this?
Isis Mussenden: To start off, no, I had not heard of Bass Reeves before this. This project came to be through a fellow academy member and a board member that I worked with, the fabulous Wynn Thomas as the production designer. So Wynn and I sat next to each other through numerous hours of meetings over the last six years together, and he said, “Hey, I’ve got this project. I’ve never done episodic. I’ve never done anything like this, but I think it’s really worth it. It’s a super interesting project with David Oyelowo heading it up and will you read it and will you think about it?” And I started doing some research and I thought, wow, this could be fun. I had never done a full on Western. I had done a couple Westerny things, but nothing like this. So at my point of my career, I’m always looking for something new and interesting.
Ayla Ruby: I have a lot of questions about that, but I’ll get to the Western stuff later. So you mentioned a little bit, you started doing research. Can you talk about your process from when you read the scripts to outfitting a character to a piece? How do you approach this process when you’ve got a blank page to build your stuff.
Isis Mussenden: Well, it’s not unlike every project I do, even if it’s contemporary, but when you have something of this historical value and when you’re depicting a lot of real people that lived, you kind of go in a different direction of first diving into any kind of imagery or any kind of text I can find about the real people. So I started with that, with Bass and his wife Jenny. And then it’s about where’s the location? What part of the world are we in? What part of the United States are we in, and what’s happening at that time?
So our story starts in 1863, close to the end of the Civil War. Another era I had not really dove into in my life. It was not something that I knew a lot about other than our basic high school and elementary school teaching, which we learn is not really that much.
So that was really fun. So I started by getting, there’s a catalog of books from Time Warner Books, which is something that existed years and years ago. Back in the ’70s they used to… They’re not encyclopedias, but they would be these, for lack of a better word, like the Ken Burns version of getting heavily into a subject. But it was all text and a lot of photographs, and they’re beautiful, these books. And I knew it because one of my first jobs in LA across selling handbags at Amalia’s Handbags at Farmer’s Market across the way from where we were, was this man who sold these catalogs of books.
So something always was in my head, and I knew that one of my old assistants, who’s now a fine designer in her own right, had inherited a set of the Western books from a friend of ours who was a designer who had passed away. So I immediately called her and got the whole catalog of these books. And they’re brilliant because they have, almost every photograph you could find on the internet is probably pulled from one of these books or pulled from one of their sources.
Ayla Ruby: Wow.
Isis Mussenden: But the text is just as important. And each book was like, one was called the Pioneer Women and one was called the Outlaws and one was called the Lawmen and one was called the Indian Territories, another was the Civil War, but one was the South and one was the North. So I started with those books, really, and some basic just internet work that I would normally do. But those books were really, they catapulted me into the fine tune and the nuances between all these different kinds of people in that era. And it took me weeks to just start absorbing it. Absorbing and really looking hard at the imagery for the fine nuances between a lawman and a farmer and a rancher and a city guy. I mean, because what they wore were so few pieces. It wasn’t like fashion is today, and yet each of them had their own look.
Ayla Ruby: I think you can really see that too in the transition with Bass as he becomes this Lawman he totally transforms. And I’d love to know about that process. If you could talk about his initial, how you started his initial look to where you ended up.
Isis Mussenden: Well, with me, it’s always about that first fitting. And so David, because he is the producer and he was the star was available to us very early in the process before anybody else was cast. So I gathered a lot of pieces in his sizes and knowing that he had a huge story arc from an enslaved man to a farmer to the beginning of his law career haphazard into affluence, because these men made a lot of money. Into homesteading and affluence and a certain level of respect in the society that he had.
So we knew the arc, but we needed to know the beginning and the end before we could fill in the middle. So in that very first fitting, we hit the note of the body man, which is what he was called when he worked, and he was enslaved for his “master.” And we started with that and we went to the Indian territories where he spent two years and started playing around with the black Seminole look. It was a very interesting tribe of Indian in that particular territory that I’d never ever researched before. And then we had to hit the end. And once we found what Bass Reeve’s iconic, sharp, he’s all right there, which is the black hat, darker suit, with the deep greens and the textures. Once we had that and we had where we started, then we started to find the nuance of all the other changes along the arc with each story and each episode where he upped his game, and upped his game, and upped his game.
Ayla Ruby: How about for Lauren Banks’ character, or any of the other characters, can you talk about some of the interesting transformations for them?
Isis Mussenden: I think that first of all, Lauren E. Banks, one of the most beautiful women ever to be in the craft, it was not hard. She’s pretty spectacular looking. And then Joaquina who played Esme, so I do a lot of contrasting character is what I like. Because if you don’t have the contrast next to them, you don’t know what it looks like. You’re not telling the story. It’s not easy to tell the story, and it’s not easy to see the story. I always use the example of a big tall mountain photographed, beautiful. But you put a man in front of it that’s teeny, teeny, teeny, and suddenly that mountain is massive. So it’s always a bit of contrast there.
So with Jenny’s story, who was Lauren, and with Joaquina’s story, who was Esme, as cousins they start in the same place, in the same plantation. We lose them apart from each other. And when Esme comes back in, she has had this whole life in the North, very wealthy, very highfalutin, very fancy, and she was also my muse because she wore everything so beautifully. So we made everything for her, it was fantastic. And Jenny starts out as a simple pioneer woman and a farmer’s wife. And as Jenny grows in her story of sophistication and the years of being in society, and Joaquina gets knocked down a little and comes down to more reality from where her start, where we end up is with the two of them at the same place at the end. Which was kind of the idea of how to get these two women to tell their story. How they were together, how they went apart, and how they came back.
Ayla Ruby: So there’s also a matter of practicality, right? There are layers, there are pieces, but your actors are moving emoting, they’re like riding horses. How do you manage that from a costume standpoint? What’s your philosophy there?
Isis Mussenden: Well, it all depends on what they need from us. We will do anything we have to underneath the clothing to give them the comfort they need and so that they have the ability to do the acting they need. If you’ve got somebody on a horse and they’re all sore, we’ll give them bicycle pants underneath to give them something softer for the saddle. I mean, very often we’re shooting these things out of sequence, and we shot in Texas which was not familiar to me, that weather. I’m from Southern California, I always thought it was just warm there all the time. It was freezing cold, and then it was super hot, and then it was freezing cold. But we had to keep the consistency of all the costumes to match the continuity. So one day we’d have water, little mini water bottles all over David to keep him warm. And then the next three weeks later, we’d be putting a cooling suit on inside all those layers of wool. And it was heavy. That stuff was heavy and warm. And I mean, this is what people wore in all kinds of weather because it was protection.
Ayla Ruby: Yup.
Isis Mussenden: It was a means of protecting their skin and protecting… And they had one thing and they wore it for two weeks. I mean, that was it. There was no washing. So it’s just the tricks of the trade. And that’s basically my set team will work with us and we’ll get them whatever they need. But yeah, sometimes we build gussets into some of the pants and those would be the pants for riding the horses. And then the gusset wouldn’t be there for the pants that are not riding the horses.
Ayla Ruby: Gotcha.
Isis Mussenden: It wasn’t so baggy. Yeah, whatever, that’s the side job. We try to design the costumes. I mean, of course if there’s a stunt and they need to have long sleeves because they need pads, we do that too. But in this era, pretty much that’s what they would’ve had anyway, so I wasn’t so squeezed by the parameters of what we needed.
Ayla Ruby: Now, in addition to your main cast, there are also… Like the scale of this show, you’ve got a massive time period, and also you have a lot of people. How do you approach that? Because there’s lots and lots of extras, there’s just building out the world. You can’t have somebody in modern clothing.
Isis Mussenden: That’s right. It takes an army. I’ll tell you, it takes an army. So having done big fantasy pieces and period pieces before, we approach it the same way. So I break it off into teams. I had my Native American team who did a lot of the jewelry and concentrated on… My ACD, Jackie, would concentrate more on what we needed for the wedding and what we needed for all the native touches, even with the Western touches. And then I had my Civil War team because that opening sequence, which is four minutes long, was like doing a movie unto itself. We had 129 stuntmen just on day one.
Ayla Ruby: Wow.
Isis Mussenden: 360 people onscreen, 80 horses, guns stunts.
Ayla Ruby: Wow.
Isis Mussenden: It went on for weeks because on day two of shooting it, a huge storm came into Fort Worth, and we had an ice storm for four days. So then we had to go down and everybody was away. And then we came back and it was freezing cold. So that was a whole team of people that did nothing but the uniforms for that. And then I have my team that we’re taking care of all the day players. I mean, we have the fabulous Barry Pepper and Dennis Quaid. And I mean that’s the fun of it is all the different types, all the different kinds of people, and all of the different characters. And these actors like Shea Whigham, when they come in, they bring something to it. Not only from their acting, but physically they bring something into it.
So each time I get to choose what is it that makes their character them? What can we do together to tell the story that this actor wants to tell and that Chad [Feehan] and our directors want us to portray. And the more I get into it, the more I get into it with each actor, which is, for me, the fun. Is what gives me the variation of all the different kinds of costumes we can do. Then I had a whole extras team. Jillian [Bundrick] ran that, and Jillian was amazing. She had a great eye. She ran a team of probably 12 people who did nothing but fit extras and fit extras and set them up, and fit them, and set them up, and break them down, and do the alterations and fit. We fit every single person that was on screen. Every single person had a fitting.
Ayla Ruby: That’s fantastic and amazing. So besides the scale, was there anything really, really challenging or just super professionally gratifying about this project? Or something that you have a favorite that you want to talk about?
Isis Mussenden: That’s a lot. Let’s see.
Ayla Ruby: Yeah. It’s like three questions in one.
Isis Mussenden: Yes, it is.
Ayla Ruby: You can pick what you want to answer.
Isis Mussenden: Okay, I’ll start with challenging. The whole project was challenging because it was a very large scale and we had weather that we had to deal with and so many extras. We started with about 1,700 for the whole series, and we went up to 5,000. By the time we were done that’s how many we had dressed.
The other challenging part of that was there were two or three other Westerns being shot at the same time, and we get a lot of our extra clothes from the costume shops, from their collection. So we were all fighting over the same clothes to the point where I had to go even to Europe to get clothing at one point because we were running out and because we could never quite finish some sequences, we had to hold those clothes. So I think at one point we had 700 or 900 costumes from head to toe in bag saved in our space.
Ayla Ruby: Wow.
Isis Mussenden: So that was really challenging. Satisfying, it’s all satisfying. It’s all satisfying to see it on screen and to see how beautiful Christina shot it. And just, I think every morning that we’d get there early and the whole team would be dressing and the hair and makeup people would be doing it, and we’d finally get them out there and the ADs would set it up. We got a big city scene and somebody go action, and you’re just like, oh my God. What it takes from me, from hair, from makeup, from production design to the props, to the animal wranglers. When it all comes together like that, that’s kind of a high. So that’s satisfying almost every day on a regular basis. Yeah, no, it was great. We did a carnival, I mean a carnival in 1800. I mean, it was fantastic.
Ayla Ruby: You don’t see that every day.
Isis Mussenden: No, you don’t. And listen, opportunity is everything. So to get the opportunity to do it, to say they’re like… I mean, we don’t go, “Oh, there’s a carnival. Oh, that’s horrible.” We’re like, “Oh my God, there’s a carnival and let’s build the stilt man’s pants and we’ll do this and we’ll do that.” I mean, it’s a lot of work, but when it’s fun like that, when it’s interesting, it’s very satisfying.
Ayla Ruby: Is there anything you want people to know about the project or anything you’re working on next?
Isis Mussenden: Well, what I would like everyone to know about the project is that our two fearless leaders, Chad Feehan and David Oyelowo were amazing, truly amazing. David is one of the most wonderful people I’ve met in my life. Both of them were kind and super smart and very supportive. And I think that should not go without saying, because when you have that kind of leadership at the top of a show like this, I think it shows all the way through. And I never take that for granted because not always there. So yeah. That’s really great.
Ayla Ruby: That’s a wonderful sentiment. Thank you so much for chatting. This has been great.
Isis Mussenden: Thank you. You too.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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