‘The Ugly Stepsister’ make-up and hairstyling team on creating "beauty and dirt" and their shock Oscar nomination

When Danish duo Thomas Foldberg (prosthetic make-up designer and special make-up effects artist) and Anne Cathrine Sauerberg (make-up designer) were scurrying around the set of Norway-­Sweden-Poland co-production The Ugly Stepsister, thoughts of a best make-up and hairstyling Oscar nomination never crossed their minds. Why would it? Quite apart from their latest gig being a small international film that grew out of debut feature filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt’s thesis project at the Norwegian Film School, it was hardly the type of material the Academy tends to favour.

The inspiration was Aschen­puttel, the Brothers Grimm’s twisted 19th-century version of the Cinderella folk tale, but Blichfeldt was determined to graft on scenes of gut-roiling body horror: pierced eyelids, a monstrous tapeworm and toes hacked off to fit a foot into that glass slipper.

“I had a lot of days where I felt like Fawlty Towers, running from set to the make-up trailer,” says Foldberg, who had just one assistant on set and sometimes worked alone. While he was concentrating on the horror elements, Sauerberg turned to the period look and the fairy-tale elements. “It was me doing curls and wigs, and Thomas in another trailer,” she recalls. “We met sometimes. ‘Thomas, did you have anything to eat?’ ‘No.’ ‘Here, have a biscuit!’”

Foldberg and Sauerberg first worked together on the latter’s school project in the early 1990s. She had attended make-up school in London, while he was a teenager collecting editions of visual-effects journal Cinefex, “looking with big eyes at the pictures”. They have teamed up many times since on commercials and Danish TV shows (including Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom and Men & Chicken), developing a shorthand. But they also go their separate ways, her resumé decorated with Magnus von Horn’s gothic historical drama The Girl With The Needle, his boasting home hit Riders Of Justice and Hollywood franchise reboot Alien: Romulus.

Twisted tale

For The Ugly Stepsister, Foldberg came on board first, given four months’ build time before the shoot began. He reached out to Sauer­berg for hair and make-up, requiring her expertise to help feather the fairy tale and horror movie elements. Blichfeldt’s vision was to offer a feminist spin on the Cinderella tale, showing the heroine Elvira (Lea Myren) subjected to a series of horrific beauty treatments so that she might compete with her alluring stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) for the hand of toxic Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth).

“Emilie made this mood board,” says Sauerberg. “I was just, ‘It’s my dream movie — beauty and dirt at the same time.’” Perhaps the best showcase for Sauerberg’s detailed work is the centrepiece ball sequence, in which Elvira looks at her most stereo­typically attractive. “The ringlets in her hair came late in the project,” says Sauerberg. “We were talking a lot about worms, and also [how it is] something your mum would do with the [curling] iron, when you haven’t become yourself yet. Much later I saw this image of the ugly stepsisters in the Disney version [of Cinderella], and they have those curls. It was pure coincidence. Being European, a lot of the Disney fairy tales are, for us, Grimm stories.”

Foldberg’s standout scenes arrive immediately before and after the ball, as Elvira’s body revolts against the series of cosmetic treatments that include swallowing the egg of a tapeworm to lose weight. At the start of the movie, Elvira is considered too heavy by her domineering mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp). “We did a whole prosthetic look on Lea,” says Foldberg. “She was wearing cheeks and a nose and this little double chin and a neck piece.” At the ball, a slim Elvira, now minus the prosthetics, nevertheless loses the prince’s attention to the exquisite Agnes, who leaves him clutching a glass slipper as she flees at midnight. And for Elvira, things go rapidly from bad to worse.

“As soon as Elvira starts to lose the hair, she also wears contacts to have this illness to her eyes,” explains Foldberg, who escalates her degeneration in a manner that recalls Seth Brundle’s plight in David Cronenberg’s The Fly: hair loss, blistered skin, vomiting. On hearing that Prince Julian is searching for the foot to fit his slipper, Elvira hacks off her toes.

“Normally when I do body stuff, it has to be realistic, so I suggested I would not have a clean cut, really gross,” says Foldberg. “But Emilie said, ‘No, we want sharp edges, almost like it’s a marzipan foot. The blood has to be really red.’ She was so specific.”

Premiering in the Midnight section of 2025’s Sundance Film Festival before playing the Berlinale’s Panorama, The Ugly Stepsister was released in cinemas by Scanbox Entertainment in Norway and by IFC Films in the US. It won best feature at genre-flavoured Sitges Film Festival in October, and was picked up by US video-on-demand service Shudder to stream in North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The film’s strong reviews and word of mouth were confined mainly to the genre circuit, so the Oscar nomination was a shock.

“It’s amazing,” says Sauerberg, who nods when asked if she knew the Academy’s make-up and hair voters were so diligent in their viewing. Foldberg adds: “Suddenly people were starting to see the film. I discovered that some wonderful American colleagues were mentioning it.”

Might people have also given the film a look because he had worked on Alien: Romulus? Foldberg shakes his head. “No, because the American productions I’ve been involved with, I’ve just been part of a big crew, a hired gun, like a lot of others.”

Still, presumably the nomination will lead to more work in Hollywood. “No idea,” they say simultaneously with a grin.

“I’ve done a lot of co-­productions lately,” adds Sauerberg. “There’s something about this co-working that I find so stimulating. So if I could have a dream about this, then it would be for more big Hollywood movies to come to Europe. I can put together a team in almost every country. I just love the energy of meeting new people.”

Foldberg ponders: “Maybe everything is just the same after March 15, I don’t know. But it still looks good on the resumé.”

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