'Game Change': Julianne Moore's Sarah Palin Makeover Fooled Her Husband And Kids

Getty Images; HBO

Julianne Moore looks more like Sarah Palin in HBO’s Game Change than Sarah Palin does in real life. 

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And she’s already getting major Emmy buzz for her portrayal of the former Alaskan governor and republican vice presidential candidate in the TV film about the 2008 campaign.

Far from being a 'Gotcha' Saturday Night Live skit starring Tina Fey, the movie is a fascinating and oft times moving exploration of the events, people, and politics behind Palin's selection and her painful grooming for the pressure and the press she would have to face. 

But key to the  film's success is the hair, makeup and wardrobe departments who totally nailed the Palin look. First the makeup artists changed Moore's fair complexion to approximate Palin’s darker skin tone. They had to cover up Moore's myriad natural freckles, then applied a darker base and blend, blend, blended.

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Her lips and eyes were cheated by using a lip pencil to redrawing the shape of the mouth to resemble Palin's. Moore also wore contact lenses made by Dr Mitchell Cassel -- he did Nicole Kidman's eyes for The Hours -- enlarged the area of the iris on the contact lens so that Ms Moore's peepers appeared larger and darker like Palin’s. Moore also wore the same Palinesque wire-rimmed glasses, scaled down a bit because her face is somewhat smaller.

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But the Palin wig was the coup de gras. Her husband Bart Freundlich told People: "We took some pictures with the kids, and it’s like us with Sarah Palin. We weren’t freaking out, because we’ve all been on so many sets with her. But it was kind of eerie, uncanny. Being a guy, I couldn’t...figure out what was making her look like that. When she would take off the wig, I’d think, ‘Oh, that was a wig!'"