Hello and happy new year! For this first episode of 2024, I’m really excited to share my conversation with Hollywood costume supervisor Sara Walbridge.
(You can stream our chat via the embed here or pretty much anywhere else you source your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and Google Podcasts.)
Sara is a graduate of The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago and has been steadily working in Hollywood for over 20 years. Some of her best known TV projects include Love and Death, Barry, GLOW, and True Blood, and her film credits include Don’t Look Up, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Vice, and Beautiful Boy.
In our chat today, she gives me the lowdown on how costume supervising is like solving a puzzle; how the immediate aftermath of 9/11 inadvertently shaped the trajectory of her career; why if you don’t notice the costumes in a movie or TV show, that actually means they’ve been executed really well; what the most pressing concerns about AI are for costume departments; the kinds of questions that get tossed around in the group chat of the so-called Costume Mafia; why working as a costume supervisor is secretly kind of a blue-collar job; and why she nerds out about making to-scale maps of changing tents for huge groups of extras. Plus, since we’re well into awards season now, Sara highlights some of her favorite costuming moments from the year gone by that she hopes will be recognized by voters.
For my Letterboxd users out there, I’ve created a list featuring all the films we talk about in this episode.
SHOW NOTES
Click here to view Sara’s IMDB page.
Sara’s union is IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States.
The costume designer from Love and Death, Audrey Fisher.
View Susan Matheson’s IMDB page or read about her work on Don’t Look Up here.
Some prominent recent projects that Sara has worked on:
Love and Death
Don’t Look Up
Space Jam: A New Legacy
Beautiful Boy
Other movies & TV shows mentioned:
Barbie
Oppenheimer
Dumb Money
Killers of the Flower Moon
Game of Thrones
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Dune: Part Two
The Holdovers
Tár
Monica
Click here for a Letterboxd list of all the films Sara mentions in this episode.
Queen of Peaches 