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Peter Philips has always loved to draw. Growing up in Belgium, the creative and image director for Christian Dior makeup was a graphic design student before studying at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. But the breakthrough moment in his career came when he drew a portrait of Mickey Mouse freehand on a male model’s face on an early Raf Simons and Willy Vanderperre shoot. In this shoot for ELLE, Philips was inspired by his love for audacious color, art, and graphic elements to create a beauty portfolio of eye-catching looks on actress Alexandra Daddario, Dior fashion and makeup ambassador.
“I felt like a canvas,” Daddario says. “I’ve never done makeup like this before.” She wears more of a no-makeup-makeup look for her role as a neurosurgeon witch on AMC+’s Mayfair Witches, based on the novels by Anne Rice (the series also recently dropped on Netflix). “It’s a really magical thing to see yourself transform in the hands of artists.” Below, ELLE talked to Daddario about coming into her power as a witch, her go-to makeup routine, and her self-care pregnancy rituals.
What did you think of the shoot? Have you worn makeup like that before?
No. It was really unique. It was fun having my makeup done by Peter. He’s one of the greatest. I told him, “You’re like a surgeon.” His manner was very precise, especially in the way he was asking for different brushes or makeup. He was a wonderful person, and I felt like a canvas, while he was doing beautiful art.
What do you personally gravitate towards when it comes to beauty?
With doing my show, I wear makeup every day for six months, so it’s nice to take a break. When I do have to put on makeup myself, I’m quite simple. I don’t do a ton: Mascara, eyeshadow, and a little eyeliner. I’ve gotten very into filling my brows out and using a little blush. I try not to use too much foundation to take breaks while filming. I eat too much to wear lipstick. It’s always coming off, and I have to worry about it.
Since being pregnant, do you have any new self-care habits or practices you’ve picked up?
I’m constantly thinking about the baby. That’s the only really exhausting and new part. Did I eat enough iron today? Did I stretch my hips enough for childbirth? Did I take my choline pill? Everything else is pretty similar, except I can’t drink. I keep buying wine and saying, “I’ll have this after I give birth.” There’s a lot of great wine in my wine fridge.
Has pregnancy made you feel any differently about your body?
I feel the same way about it, except I wear my husband’s jeans now. I view food and exercise as medicine even more strongly than I did before. Health and happiness feels beautiful to me.
I was confused about morning sickness—why would being pregnant necessitate making a woman so sick she couldn’t keep food down? It didn’t make sense to me, evolutionarily or otherwise. Also, there’s a baby doing flips in my stomach, and that’s really very cool. The ultrasounds have been my favorite part.
Is there a particular element of beauty that helps you get more into your character for Mayfair Witches?
I’m playing a witch, so I get to channel that. It’s about a woman who is stepping into her power literally, but also figuratively and stepping into who she is. This is a character that’s constantly growing up, even in her 30s, and a lot of the clothes and makeup reflect that as the season goes on. We also get to do a transformation in some of the later episodes.
Were you ever into witchy culture? Was that a subject of fascination for you growing up?
I remember watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch. As a young woman, there’s also this sense of wanting to tap into magic and figure out what your power is. Obviously, it doesn’t become literal powers, but I think that you’re able to see all the magic in the world from using your imagination. As a kid, I remember my friend taught me how to make a weird brew where we mixed together Kleenex, water, olive oil, and other weird stuff from the kitchen. I was supposed to keep it in my closet for 48 hours, and my mom found it and was like, “What the hell is going on? What is this?”
As a young person, the idea of an imaginary source of power is very alluring.
Yeah. We all have that to a certain extent. There are all different kinds of things that we believe in, like believing in the power of thought. When I was growing up, The Secret was very popular. And listen, there are some parts of my life that feel very magical. There are some parts that don’t, but there have definitely been times in my life that something happened that was kind of magical.
You mentioned this a little bit, but what can we look forward to in the new season?
This character is constantly going through transformations and learning new things. She’s a woman who just found her real parents. She found out who she comes from, and it’s this crazy, dark world. It’s a lot to handle, finding out she’s a witch and has inherited this house and all this money. Getting involved in this really magical, supernatural world would be a lot for anyone. It’s a fun world to explore.
Your character also deals with family drama, right?
I really like that this is a family story. In some of the greatest stories, even in Greek mythology, it’s all just dysfunctional families and relationships. This is something that’s been going on since the beginning of time. A lot of people have dysfunctional families or [families] which are functional in a dysfunctional way. This is a dysfunctional family to the extreme, so it can be relatable.
Did you look at any particular inspirations or source material when diving into this new witchy world?
I read The Witching Hour, but it was really important to me to find out who Rice was. I really delved into it. She was a fascinating woman, and had all kinds of things happen to her as a young person. I was curious about why she wrote these books, who she was, and how she created these worlds. There was a book that I found which contained emails a fan had sent her, and she would email this person back every single time and answer her questions in detail.
For example, I learned that she lost a daughter at four years old. Obviously, for anyone who’s lost a child, it’s absolutely horrific. There are lots of themes in her novels, such as where do you go when you die? How do you survive on this earth when you’ve had something like [loss] happen? She believed in ghosts, and was quite interested in the supernatural and in scientific studies of people coming from the beyond and saying “hello” in all these different ways. Her books delve into what it means to die and lose someone, mourning, loss, and how you recover from that. I don’t mean to speak for her. I’m sure there are people who know more than I do, but I think that a lot of that affected her views of what it meant to be human.
Do you believe in ghosts?
I’m not sure. I’ve never seen one, but maybe they just know that I couldn’t handle it if they showed up. But I’ve heard crazy stories. My friend Morgan was down in New Orleans with me [where we shoot], and we were living in the same house. She claims that there was a ghost in the house that would come and pet my dog.
New Orleans is filled with [ghost] lore. It is a very haunted place. It has a really, really intense history. There are a lot of really magical people there. Sometimes I’ve had tarot card readings or psychic readings that were nuts.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
A version of this story appears in the September 2024 issue of ELLE.
Kathleen Hou is ELLE’s Beauty Director. Previously, she held the same title at New York Magazine’s The Cut. She’s appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Vogue India, Forbes, and Allure. She was also a co-founder of Donate Beauty, a grassroots beauty donation project started during the COVID-19 crisis, which donated over 500,000 products to over 30,000 healthcare workers across 500-plus hospitals.