The Residence Turned Into a 'Jigsaw Puzzle' for Costume Designer Lyn Paolo
Dressing an enormous ensemble cast to run around the White House is a much trickier prospect than you might think—starting with the color palette.
Without Basil Rathbone, there would be no Cordelia Cupp. At least, not the Cordelia Cupp as we know her from Netflix’s The Residence, resplendent in an English hunting jacket, brogues, and Katharine Hepburn pants.
“[Showrunner Paul William Davies] and I went through all these different ideas for Cordelia,” Emmy-winning costume designer Lyn Paolo said at the Netflix FYSee event Crafting Characters Across the Eras, alongside artisans from American Primeval and Nobody Wants This. “I suddenly turned to him and said, ‘Have you ever seen anything with Basil Rathbone?’ And he didn't really know who Basil Rathbone was. And we looked up the old Sherlock Holmes [films]; I was pitching a British hunting jacket, but modernize it so that it would become Cordelia's superhero uniform. And especially for our lovely actress Uzo [Aduba], just to give her that lovely shape and tailor her.”
The Sherlock Holmes reference is fitting for a show about an idiosyncratic detective investigating a mysterious death in the White House during a state dinner, in the process interviewing dozens of staffers and some very famous Australians. But while Rathbone came about courtesy of Paolo’s passion for Agatha Christie, the earth tones that Cordelia wears came out of sheer necessity.
“Because of the show being set in [the White House], there's a Blue Room, a Yellow Room, a Green Room, a Red Room,” Paolo said. “So my whole color palette was taken away, and we had 280 people running around the set every day. What do you do? We ended up with those earth tones for her. We ended up making 15 of everything for her so we could get through the whole series, and the same for all of the guests. We made a good percentage of [everything] because it had to be very specific. It couldn't just be a gown from Saks Fifth Avenue. We had to really keep our palette in this very limited colorway. So it was a really fun exercise, like a big jigsaw puzzle: ‘Who's gonna be in which room, what color are they gonna be in?’ And we had a blast. It was so much fun.”
The narrow palette made things challenging, but Paolo’s career is a study in crafting minutely detailed characters out of what might be mistaken, at first glance, for off-the-rack simplicity. In addition to the period gowns of Queen Charlotte, Paolo also designed the costumes for ER, The West Wing (“We made all of those suits,” she told me later), and The Pitt. In The Residence, just as much as in Paolo’s work on Inventing Anna, the details matter.
“I think I had 57 principal actors, and you are telling a story that takes place basically in one night,” she said. “And then you have all the men in black [tie], and how do you distinguish each of those men from one another?” One subtle clue was Paolo’s choice to dress the visiting Australians in navy blue “because the Australians were more fun.” And to impose some kind of visual order on the proceedings, all of the background artists wore metallics.
“I've done a lot of big shows, but this one was rather tricky because you couldn't use anything that was in your normal color palette,” Paolo stressed. “You want each of your characters to stand out, and you want their costume to tell the audience who they are. And the fact that I had so many parameters stopping me from doing what I would normally do actually made it, I don't want to say harder, but more challenging. But as I said earlier, it was terrific fun because we had to really think differently than we had before.”
Lyn Paolo is a three-time CDG Award nominee and a two-time Emmy winner, whose credits include Homefront, Scandal, Animal Kingdom, and Shameless.