Pfeiffer has spoken about it frequently, telling THR in a 2017 interview, “It was the most uncomfortable costume I’ve ever been in. They had to powder me down, help me inside, and then vacuum-pack the suit.” That sounds awful. She said that they then had to paint it with a silicone-based finish to get that shine. That wasn’t all. Pfeiffer said, “I had those claws, and I was always catching them in things. The face mask was smashing my face and choking me … we had a lot of bugs to work out.”
They also had to rig the costume so she could use the restroom — after it had already been made — and wow, that’s something that really should have been part of the original design. So you’ve got the claws ripping stuff, powder to even get into it, a difficult time using the bathroom, being vacuum-packed like a piece of dried fruit, and a whip. What else? Well, Pfeiffer mentioned in an 1992 ET interview:
“My first week was like this — my boots weren’t right. I couldn’t walk in them because I kept tilting forward, and my mask was smashing my face, and I couldn’t hear, and it was cutting off my vocal cords, and I couldn’t really breathe in the corset. And then they would have all of these lights in my way, and I would have to then change, on the spot, what I had planned and what kind of routine I had planned with my whip. And then I had to act.”
Oh, right. Acting. The reason she’s there in the first place, right? There is that quote about suffering for your art, but I’m pretty sure it’s not suffocating for your art.
