‘What We Do In The Shadows’ Costume Designer Laura Montgomery On Crafting “Wacky” Costumes For “Interesting Bodies” – Production Value

“Every season, the vampires have to do formal wear, so every year we are kind of upping the ante with them,” says What We Do in the Shadows costume designer Laura Montgomery. “But this year with it being [Nandor’s] wedding and him being a total groomzilla, he really had to be extra special.”

What We Do in the Shadows takes a fictional documentary look at four vampires – Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Lazslo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) – along with their familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén). In the fourth season, Nandor decides to get married and have a big vampire wedding, which was a perfect challenge for any costume designer.

“It’s a wedding, so there are going to be a lot of costumes – the wedding dress, wedding party, the wedding guests,” says Montgomery. “We did a really special thing for Nandor’s wedding look with a bit of a departure for him.”

Since most of the time and resources were used to create Nandor’s wedding outfit, Montgomery had to find a workaround to create his wife’s wedding dress. She purchased a wedding dress with the basic shape and fabric needed and added onto it. “It’s like we bought a sheet cake and then piled tons of icing onto it,” she says. “We put tons of lace and trim and added a little jacket and it went from being a white dress to being this silver, metallic gold Persian princess kind of moment.”

In addition to creating wedding attire, Montgomery also needed to create bespoke costumes for the Baron (Doug Jones), as he is a charred torso with one arm fused to his body. Due to his insecurites, Nadja and The Guide (Kristen Schaal) take the Baron to a tailor shop for a makeover montage. “We knew for the montage that we would have to build most of the costumes just because of the bodies,” she says. “I can’t go to Banana Republic and just buy something that’s going to fit a charred legless torso with one arm fused to their body. It’s just not in their size run.”

The “buffet of wacky costumes,” some of which Montgomery says may have been cut for time, included a business man with a trench coat, a little sailor boy, a candy striped suit matching with Nadja on a bicycle and even more as the other characters got involved. “It was really just a buffet of wacky costumes,” she says. “I can’t remember how many little vignettes it was, but it’s a montage with really funny costumes on really interesting bodies.”

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