Doom Patrol Season 2 Feature Breaks Down the Magic of Dorothy's Makeup

The second season of HBO Max's Doom Patrol saw the unusual team of heroes take on one of their biggest challenges yet when Dorothy Spinner (Abigail Shapiro) came to live at Doom Manor. The daughter of the Niles Caulder/The Chief (Timothy Dalton), Dorothy is an unusual and extremely powerful little girl, but she also has a very unique look. Now, in an exclusive clip from one of the bonus features on the upcoming Doom Patrol: The Complete Second Season Bu-ray and DVD release, makeup and FX artists working on the series break down some of the challenges of creating Dorothy's look -- one that needed to be true both to the series itself as well as the character's comic book appearance.

"With Dorothy, I think the pressures are pretty big. The fans are definitely going to be critical and really like 'oh, she has to look this certain way,'" Derek Garcia, special FX makeup artist says in the clip.

"I think the way she looks looks as good as it can be to make it as realistic as possible and still stay true to what she is," special FX makeup artist Eric Garcia adds.

In comics, Dorothy first appeared in Doom Patrol vol. 2 #14 in 1988. Created by Paul Kupperberg, Erik Larsen, and Jim Sanders III, Dorothy was given up for adoption as a baby and suffered from a facial deformity that made her appearance more like that of an ape. Isolated due to her deformity, Dorothy's only comfort was her imaginary friends and she soon learned she had the power to bring those imaginary friends to life. On HBO Max's Doom Patrol, Dorothy is the daughter of The Chief and Slava (Pisay Pao), a primitive woman from the Yukon who Niles fell in love with during an expedition to investigate for the Bureau of Oddities in the early 1900s. This different origin prompted some slight changes in Dorothy's appearance, one that required a blending of her comic book look versus her new origin for the series.

"The challenge with her is that Slava is not very simian and so we had to try to take the comic book look and then modify it with what made sense with the mother and the way she looked and kind of do a combination of the two so that we ended up with the look that Dorothy ended up having," makeup FX designer Bill Johnson says.

The makeup to bring Dorothy to life is something that Shapiro herself previously spoke about with ComicBook.com, talking about how it was a challenge, but that eventually Derek and Eric Garcia were able to get the makeup and prosthetics down to a solid routine.

"In the beginning, it was about three hours," Shapiro said about the time required to get into makeup for Dorothy. "And then, by the middle of the season, we got it down to two hours. And when we were filming the last episode, we had one day where we got it to an hour 45, which was really cool. They're so good at what they do. They're so talented, the whole makeup team on the show."

Doom Patrol: The Complete Second Season features all 9 episodes from Season Two along with two special features, "The Transformers: Doom Patrol's Make-up FX" and "Doom Patrol - Com Visit Georgia PSA". Doom Patrol: The Complete Second Season will be released on both DVD and Blu-ray on January 26th with a suggested retail price of $29.98 for the DVD and $39.99 for the Blu-ray.