Special effects makeup artist Meg Wilbur in the backyard studio of her Ewing home with a work in progress named Big Friendly Tree. Wilbur is competing on the SyFy network show Face Off. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)
By Michelle Hart
“I didn’t go to school for this,” says Meg Wilbur. “I learned it on the internet.”
The 24-year-old woman utters the words with a lilt of irony, somehow both sardonic and sunny. Her lips are pursed in an unworried smile. Half of her head is shaved. As far as television introductions go, Wilbur’s is immediately memorable.
The show is Face Off, a reality competition program on the SyFy network in which aspiring special effects makeup artists compete for the top spot by bringing to life their own monstrous creations.
Wilbur was still alive in the competition as of week 9, the show that aired on Sept. 22. Out of a field of 16 original contestants, Wilbur is now in the Top 7. That fact might be surprising to some, given her level of expertise as a makeup artist.
On a show where everyone is something of an amateur, that one woman could emerge right away as an everywoman—that special sort of down-home, roll-with-the-punches ingenue—is remarkable.
Wilbur, who is from Ewing, arrived on the set of Face Off as an underdog, with the least amount of formal training and experience out of all the contestants in her season.
“People were talking about things that I’d literally never heard of,” Wilbur said with a laugh. She laughs a lot. Most if not all of her sentences, both on television and in life, are punctuated by a shaky chuckle.
Wilbur said that most of her preparation for the show came from “binge-watching” previous seasons. She went through all of the earlier seasons and worked out how she herself would solve each challenge.
On the show, contestants are given the topic and parameters for the week’s challenge, after which they are granted 30 minutes to conceptualize and sketch out a unique character.
“When I watched the show,” Wilbur said, “I would pause after everyone received the challenge and time myself for 30 minutes as I came up with my own sketch and concept.”
It is the kind of origin story that is wholly relatable in an age where venues like YouTube have the ability to make people psuedo-experts in their chosen field.
Of course Wilbur has loads of actual “experience”—if not necessarily classroom or workshop experience, then life experience, which for an artist can be just as valuable.
Wilbur grew up in Mercer County, in a home that fostered her creativity from an early age. Her mother in particular was always very supportive of her artistic endeavors, often going out and buying Prismacolor Colored Pencils. Wilbur also has a sister, who, like Wilbur, graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology inn Manhattan—albeit, with a degree in fashion design.
Wilbur recalls wanting to take after sister. “She had a sketchbook, so I had a sketchbook. We would both take our sketchbooks everywhere. In fact, I still carry my sketchbook everywhere under my arm.”
Wilbur’s favorite challenge on the show was the creation of a “beautiful but deadly” siren character based on a sea creature, a challenge that required Wilbur to fabricate the siren’s clothing mostly from scratch. It’s no wonder why this was Wilbur’s favorite: she was awarded the top spot for her work.
Of course the challenge had personal resonance in addition to the win. “When I got back from filming the show,” Wilbur said, “the first thing I said to my sister was, ‘There’s a challenge where I make clothes! You’re going to be so proud!’”
It was during Wilbur’s studies at FIT that adversity struck. When she was 18, in the time between her first and second semester, Wilbur was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
She describes feeling sick during her senior year of high school, feeling constantly fatigued and worn out. At the time she and her parents chalked it up to being an overworked 17-year-old girl.
Wilbur said, “We just figured that ‘oh, she’s just being a cool seventeen-year-old who doesn’t wanna go to school.’”
Her health hadn’t improved by the time she made it to college. She was exhausted all the time. Regardless, she did really well in school during her first semester. Towards the end of the semester, however, just before she was about to head home for winter break, she pulled a muscle in her back. She called her mother in pain. Her mother suggested she go see the school’s nurse practitioner. The next day Wilbur woke up with a big bruise on her neck, a severe contusion like something seen in, well, special effects makeup.
“My friend asked me, ‘What’s that on your neck?’ I went and looked in the mirror and there was a big welt sticking out of my neck,” Wilbur said.
She visited the nurse practitioner, and after waiting for “god knows how long,” the nurse examined her and listed off all the things it could have been: a really rare strain of strep throat, West Nile virus, a mosquito bite or cancer.
It turned out to be the latter.
While she was home for the holidays, the situation snowballed. Wilbur describes her mother as trying to be palliative, encouraging her that everything was going to be okay. But Wilbur knew what it was.
“I’m like, ‘Mom, I have cancer,’” she said she told her.
A biopsy was taken, which proved Wilbur correct. Yet even in the face of cancer, Wilbur didn’t lose her cool.
“My mom came into the room after the procedure and said, ‘Have you talked to the doctor? It’s cancer.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, mom, I know. Can I have some of that juice?’
The doctors removed the lymph node. Wilbur had to undergo six months of chemotherapy and fortunately didn’t need the radiation. She did lose her hair, however.
On Face Off, during her introduction, Wilbur calls attention to her half-shaved head: “After my hair grew back I decided to shave half of it cause it reminds me of my tough days.” She goes on to say that she “showed” cancer—“showed” as in “kicked its butt.”
“The thing about something like cancer”, Wilbur said, “is that you kind of start to approach life in a totally different way. It really forced me to grow up quickly. I was 18 and I was living in New York and I had the world at my fingertips, and then [the universe] is like, ‘nope.’ It kind of lit a fire underneath me.”
Wilbur describes herself as always being competitive, not necessarily stacked up against other people, but in a constant competition with herself. “I’ve always fought to be number one in my own eyes,” she said.
“When I went to go meet the woman who would end up being my oncologist for that time period, I looked her in the eyes and said, ‘You can do whatever you want to me, but I’m telling you this right now: I have a character design class on Friday morning and I’m not missing it!’
It is perhaps this resilience that radiates off her whenever she’s on screen. There’s a pluckiness about her, an enviably easy élan.
Wilbur’s pluckiness has propelled her from an internship at Disney to work as a production assistant for an independent film company, to a gig at various haunted houses, to doing makeup and fabrication for a music video.
Underground Brooklyn emcee Louis Logic commissioned Wilbur to work on the video for his song, “Big Fish Eat Little Fish.” The song is about bullying, and Logic wanted to have the bullied kid look different from everyone else. The design called for the kid to adorn a fish fin, which Wilbur fabricated and designed to be underwater-capable. It was one of the first times Wilbur witnessed someone decked out in something she designed.
Scrolling through Twitter one day, Wilbur stumbled on a tweet from McKenzie Westmore, the host of Face Off, calling for auditions for the show. Wilbur debated applying, but deemed herself to be unfit at the time. She decided to wait and apply for the next season.
But fate had other plans for Wilbur. She received a call one day from a producer on the show, who had stumbled upon Wilbur’s website and resume. The producer suggested she apply for the show, and it was an opportunity too good to pass up.
Two months after returning from her audition in Los Angeles, Wilbur received a call from a different producer, this one letting her know that she had secured a spot on the show.
Wilbur’s time on the show has been something of a roller coaster. After winning the show’s second challenge, the one with the Siren, Wilbur found herself in the bottom for two consecutive weeks. In the show’s fifth episode, Wilbur won a “foundation” challenge, but landed in the bottom during the episode’s “spotlight” challenge. In the show’s seventh episode, she secured a second victory for her fantastical rendering of Queen Mab from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Regardless of how her tenure on the show turned out, Wilbur said the experience was totally worth it. She refers to the show as a kind of “artistic boot camp.”
“The best part of being on the show was the free education,” Wilbur said. “The work that I did before the show and the work I did the second I got home was so vastly different, so much better. I feel like I learned years’ worth in a small amount of time.”
“For me, watching Face Off helped me learn to do what I do now and let me see a different side of the craft,” she said. “People really love this show and are really touched by it. To be a part of it is so insane.”
So what’s next for Wilbur, now that Face Off is finished filming?
“My dream would be to work on an indie horror film,” Wilbur said. “At this point, I would love to be a shop person more than an on-set person. But I would really do anything as long as I got to bring things to life.”
It’s an exciting time to be working in special effects and creature creation. More and more, movie studios are moving away from practical effects and towards computer generated imagery, but with this push towards CGI, there is also pushback from those passionate about practical effects.
As Wilbur put it, there is no better feeling than being able to “reach out and touch something.”
Wilbur’s ultimate dream is to work alongside John Carpenter, the famed director of such sci-fi and horror classics as “Halloween,” “The Thing” and “Big Trouble in Little China.”
Wilbur recently had an opportunity to do a pro bono recreation of Lo Pan, the ancient sorcerer from Big Trouble in Little China. Her live model for the project was none other than James Hong, who originally played the role in Carpenter’s film.
With that, and according to the principle of six degrees of separation, Wilbur is now one step closer to John Carpenter.
It’s what makes the spirit of a show like face off so valuable.
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