Sarah Sherman and SNL’s makeup head breakdown horrific “Googly Eyes” sketch
Unsurprisingly, seeing through googly eyes is not as easy as advertised.
Screenshot: YouTube
We all appreciate the level of body horror that Sarah Sherman (née Squirm) has brought to Studio 8H. Immune to much of the criticism surrounding Saturday Night Live, Sherman has carved out a niche for herself, bolstering the work of longtime Emmy-winning makeup department head Louie Zakarian to give her sketches a bit of terrifying originality. Having worked on SNL for 30 years, making devil costumes, Trump wigs, and Coneheads, Zakarian made one of Sherman’s early jugs of nightmare fuel, the googly eye-based sketch, “Eyes,” a horrible reality in 2022. Today, at New York Comic-Con, Zakarian and Sherman revealed that one of the most challenging parts with googly eyes, like all eyewear, is seeing out of them and keeping them from fogging.
For those who haven’t seen the sketch, Sherman plays a Denver tourism marketer who uses a pitch-meeting regarding Denver’s tagline to reveal her tastefully done googly eyes. Sherman pouts and complains that no one has complimented her googly eyes, eventually revealing that she hasn’t correctly stored her regular eyes, which are supposed to be refrigerated but are in Sherman’s pockets. Her new eyes might smell fine, but seeing through them was a different story.
“Finding those big googly eyes was pretty easy, but trying to figure out how [Sarah] is going to see through the big eyes, read cue cards, and match it all to your skin was the hard part,” Zakarian said. “I took the googly eyes, drilled one big hole in the back and a smaller one in the pupil part, but it was dark enough that you couldn’t see that there was a hole there.”