Cootamundra makeup artist wins gold on one of TV's biggest nights

Inspired by the design of Captain Jack Sparrow, Emily Walsh began her career in makeup after completing a TAFE course during her final years at school.

Little did she know that 18 years after completing her studies, she would win an Emmy for Outstanding Period Makeup (non-prosthetic) on the hit FX TV show Shogun.

Shogun this week broke the record for most Creative Arts Emmys won for a single season, scooping a total of 14 awards across makeup, production and costuming.

Filmed during the pandemic, Shogun is one of the most expensive shows ever filmed, costing a reported $250 million in its first season.

It quickly became one of FX’s (a network owned by Disney) most streamed shows ever, pulling in more than two billion streamed minutes across its first 10 episodes. It also has become one of the most critically acclaimed forms of media ever.

So how did one of the biggest shows in history land a makeup artist from Cootamundra?

Back in 2007, Emily was in her graduating year at Cootamundra High School. According to her mother Karen, Emily was allowed to pick up a skill-based course through TAFE and landed on makeup.

After completing her schooling and taking a gap year, Emily was offered a course in Sydney with Napoleon Perdis Cosmetics. It was there that she learnt about prosthetic makeup and began her journey into film and TV.

“When she was younger, she was always in the theatre. She was always on stage. She would do the makeup in the dance classes, and she did all that kind of stuff,” Karen said.

“After working a couple of years in London, she came back to Australia but she didn’t know what she wanted to do.

“I asked her, ‘What do you want to do?’ and she said, ‘I really want to get back into doing prosthetic makeup and the best place to do that is in Vancouver Film School in British Columbia, Canada.”

Being a Canadian citizen through ancestry (Karen was born in Canada), Emily completed her course at Vancouver Film School in 2016 and from there moved on to a handful of shows, including Canadian drama Family Law and CW’s Big Sky.

Emily then received a recommendation from one of her peers to work on a Disney-funded historical epic. Learning that it would be a high-budget adaptation of the popular Japanese story Shogun, Emily was justifiably reluctant.

“When she was first asked, she was like, ‘I don’t know whether I can do that’,” Karen said.

“I think that was when the nerves set in. The show is so big, and she was really unsure about whether she was going to do it.”

Struggling with harsh weather, pandemic restrictions and long hours, the difficulties of working on a show such as Shogun also became some of its perks.

“They [FX and Disney] brought people from Japan to show them how to tie all the costuming properly, how it would be in the old, traditional way,” Karen said.

“It became very, very authentic in that sense.

“She also worked exclusively with the lead actor Cosmo Jarvis [John Blackthorne in the series] because he was immune-compromised during the production. She learnt a lot of new skills and has taken a lot of confidence away from working with him.”

After 10 months of filming and nearly 18 months of post-production, the show finally premiered on Disney+ in Australia on 27 February, 2024. After several months of hype and countless minutes streamed, Shogun was nominated for a record 25 Emmys.

During the Creative Arts Emmys on 8 September, Emily won the prestigious award for the series’ eighth episode, titled The Abyss of Life.

“Working on Shogun has been the highlight of her career so far,” Karen said.

“On Sunday night, her time, winning that Emmy showed off just how many years of hard work she put in, and to see her get that recognition is a dream come true.”

Shogun has officially been renewed for a second season, so here’s hoping Emily and her team will return.