'Such a rush': Vancouver makeup artist wins second Emmy award

A born-and-raised Vancouver resident is among the film and television artists from the FX drama Shogun who swept the Creative Emmy Awards.

Rebecca Lee and her team took home the prize for Outstanding Period or Fantasy Makeup at the ceremony held in Los Angeles.

“My head actually fell forward,” Lee told CTV News.

“It was such a rush of emotions, one of them being absolute fear, that I was going to have to now go on stage, and I was terrified,” she said from a makeup production trailer.

The University of British Columbia graduate in theatre won her first Emmy in 2008 for her work on Sci-Fi Channel’s miniseries Tin Man, starring Zooey Deschanel and Alan Cumming.

Shogun producers wanted the series to be as authentic as possible, and Japanese artists came to Vancouver to work with the team.

“We were able to do all the bald-shaved heads on the Samurai, hundreds of them everyday,” she said.

Since it wouldn’t be feasible to use rose petals and rice powder for make-up, like they did years and years ago, “we used modern products that could emulate what authentic products would've done,” Lee explained.

Clearly her designs and the work of the team which included Krystal Devlin, Amber Trudeau, Andrea Alcala, Leslie Graham, Krista Hann, Mike Fields, and Emily Walsh impressed Emmy voters.