Costumes Ground A Multiverse in ‘Stuart Fails To Save The Universe’

For the many die hard fans of The Big Bang Theory, the continuation of the beloved sitcom through spin-offs has been a very real treat, but the latest series on HBO Max, Stuart Fails To Save The Universe, is by far the best and most hilarious offshoot from the original.

Created by Chuck Lorre, Zak Penn and Bill Prady, Stuart Fails brings supporting characters from Big Bang to the forefront, exploring the ramifications of a science experiment gone wrong, resulting in a pretty serious multiverse situation. Each episode’s adventure explores a different trope, genre or narrative type as Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman), Bert Kibbler (Brian Posehn), Barry Kripke (John Ross Bowie) and Denise (Lauren Lapkus) do their very best to fix a complex situation which is very much not within the character’s skill sets. It is hilarious, exceptionally well written, and incredibly good costume design by Saturday Night Live alum Valerie Klarich brings every detail together in a truly sophisticated manner.

I was able to meet with Klarich over Zoom to talk about her work on the show, to learn all about designing for so many different versions of reality, and to ask as many questions as I could think of about the many cameos by Big Bang characters, from Penny (Kaley Cuoco), Raj (Kunal Nayyar) and Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik) to episodes including people like Wil Wheaton and Neil deGrasse Tyson playing themselves.

Picking Up Where ‘The Big Bang Theory’ Left Off

The Big Bang Theory aired its final episode in 2019, and one of the most impressive achievements of Stuart Fails is the way characters from the source material are expanded and explored. So, I started my conversation with the costume designer by asking about how she’d connected people from the original series, background characters international audiences already love, with the figuratively larger versions we see in this spin-off.

“I love what costume designer Mary T Quigley did with Big Bang,” Valerie Kaleigh said to me, “and when I was offered the job, I wanted to make sure that I honored what she created. And Big Bang has such a massive fan base that I wanted that nostalgia feeling when people were watching it. I wanted it to feel like they were seeing the characters that they knew and loved again, but giving it a new twist. Because, now they’re the stars of the show, so their stuff should feel elevated. I wanted Stuart to have the same graphic tee, plaid shirt, cardigan, the same silhouette Mary achieved on Big Bang, but all the while making this fresh and new for a new Stuart fan base to come out of.”

The new series, which is essentially a genre blend, mixes situational comedy with an aesthetic that changes with each new episode. I wanted to know if that was as fun to do as this writer suspected it was; to design for science fiction, fantasy, even extending into period costume, dressing both everyday people sometimes and creating imaginary scenarios and deciding what the people in them would be likely to wear.

“It was a dream job for sure,” the costume designer said to me with a smile. “They had sent me the first two or three episodes before I interviewed, and the fact that it’s so drastically different in every episode made the job really fun. Most of my design background is Saturday Night Live and I think that’s what attracted them to me in the first place. There’s never enough time on SNL to fully create these different sketches and the worlds that we live in. I think what attracted me to this show the most was that every episode we get something new. This opportunity was once in a lifetime for me, I got the opportunity to do post-apocalyptic to the 1950s, primitive to superheroes, and I’m hoping that this will open the door for more opportunities now that I was able to shine. I had the most amazing wardrobe department, and a lot of the people that worked in our department have done a lot of Marvel projects, so when we got to the superhero episode it was pretty cool to learn and build and work together as a team to create.”

A Post-Apocalyptic Stuart And Friends

Episode One opens with a man walking through the wasteland, we soon learn that he is Bert Kibbler (Brian Posehn), and I needed to know about his coat. A blend of The Gunslinger, survival gear and what this writer felt sure was an Easter Egg or two, the short scene really sets the tone for the whole series. It establishes immediately that this is a different story than Big Bang, focused on totally different people in situations Sheldon and Leonard would have refused to engage with simply due to the absurdity of it all.

“The script read something about a faceless man in a long coat trudging through a post-apocalyptic world,” Klarich told me, “heading towards a comic book store that is still very much intact compared to everything around it. We did a lot of research, and of course we needed multiples of this so we couldn’t go to rental houses and kind of pull stuff that’s already been made. But we did pull a lot of things that gave us inspiration in a way, we pulled an orange puffy vest mixed with like a fishing leather vest, a designer had combined the two. I loved it but Brian is six six, so everything we found was inspiration whether it be online or in rental houses. Then mixed elements of a lot of different things to make the coat. I really liked the coats from I Know What You Did Last Summer so we looked for long, fisherman type coats and then sort of just built off of that. We wanted it to have this major hood. I take a lot of inspo from other designers who I aspire to be like, and I kind of feel like that’s a lot of what costume design is, it’s seeing things that speak to you and then developing them to make your own show’s designs.”

Stuart (Kevin Sussman) himself was also a character I wanted to know all about, he is the star off this show, and from the start he feels true to the original character, just more detailed and flushed out.

“We did some Big Bang research,” Klarich explained, “and one of the most popular looks that Stuart wore was that reddish orange plaid shirt, the graphic was a robot, and we just copied that look as closely as we could. We couldn’t get access to the clothes, but we got as close as we could to an iconic Stuart look.”

Without spoiling anything, this is definitely something that comes up immediately in the first episode, there is more than one Stuart in this story, which makes sense given the whole multiple universes premise. It is the costume design which makes it so easy for the audience to follow who is who, and I asked how the costume designer had gone about making certain that would happen.

“We called him ‘Stuart Prime’ and he was the Big Bang Stuart base,” Kalrich said. “Every time we meet him he has the same look, because we didn’t want the audience to confuse Stuart Prime from all the different versions of Stuart that you will see. I think it was good that we kept Stuart in that one Stuart Prime in that one look because watching it through it at least for me, even though I read the scripts 800 times, it allowed for us to make it clear that he’s the guy who’s guiding this all.”

“In one episode there are four Stuarts, four Denise’s, four Burt’s, and four Christie’s so it starts to get a little confusing. There were actors there, body doubles, stunt doubles, every kind of double, dressed in the same costume, all working at the same time. My wardrobe supervisor, Jessica Pasternak, she kept everyone in line with keeping it straight and It was really fun, confusing at times, but really fun.”

Stuart Will Not Fail To Save Denise

Denise (Lauren Lapkus), Stuart’s love interest and one time employee of his comic book store, gets a glow-up in this new show which the actress and character both very much deserved. It makes a statement, the attention to detail and the effort to do right by the fanbase, and I was curious about the designers motivations in that direction.

“In Big Bang she had a couple looks where she wasn’t working in the comic book store,” Klarich explained, “but mostly it was fun prints under the comic book graphic teas that Mary did. I kind of stuck with that because now the lead of this show and I wanted her to pop more. I wanted to elevate her look.”

I next asked specifically about the pattern mixing we see in the character’s wardrobe; contrasting colors or patterns that work well on the actresses tall, lithe frame, but which are unexpected and give the series opportunities it might not otherwise have to go a little ‘high fashion’. Denise likes a cute collar, and that seemed like the right place to dive into her costume design.

“Everything had to get multiplied,” Klarich said, “so we couldn’t necessarily achieve all these cool things we would find on the Real Real or vintage or whatever. We made a fun game of finding one blouse that I liked the print of, and the tailor shop would make five collars out of the one blouse, and then we would find a contemporary sweater pair with the collars. A lot of times it was just a dickie, we would just attach the collar to her neck with snaps on the neckline. There was definitely a Christopher John Rogers shirt that I found on the Real Real, it looked like splatter from paint brushes. I think she wears it in the second episode when she meets Penny in the warehouse. Then we were able to multiply her looks easier, and we were able to budget a bit doing that as well.”

When Bernadette Meets Wizard Wil Wheaton

Wil Wheaton, possibly science fiction’s most loved social media presence, is someone else that I had to ask about, and not just because this writer is a bit of a Trekkie. Having the character be a (maybe) evil wizard, facing down Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Melissa Rauch) as a (probably) evil sorceress, was an incredible story arc that felt as though every single creative department had given their all too. I first asked the designer to tell me about recreating Bernadette for this show.

“She’s lovely,” Klarich told me, “ and she was super fun to fit. I think in all of our heads, we were trying to achieve the ‘Bernadette silhouette’, and so I reached out to a tailor that worked on Big Bang. There was a fine line to maintain because she was gonna blow up, become this huge version of herself so she is in the pajamas and then she blows up into iconic Bernadette but there was a color palette in three, and it was darker and more magical. Even the brightest of colors that we saw in the happy AI world, now we see everything is darker and jewel tones and I wanted the Bernadette silhouette l in the darker palette. We built her cardigan sweater, because for whatever reason, we probably had 50 in the fitting, it just wasn’t the right thing. I wanted it to hit her right at her waist so that however many years later, she is coming back as the same character. That is a bit daunting for an actor, they want the audience to relate to them and I listened carefully to her notes to make sure we were able to make sure everyone felt like we achieved that right thing.”

And what was it like to have the opportunity to work with Wil Wheaton?

“Wil was lovely,” Klarich told me with a grin, “he just came in and loved what we were doing. The best part was when he was there in his fittings, Jonathan Frakes, who is a director from the Star Trek world and he met Will when Will was a child, came into the fitting.It was just really fun to see them reconnect. I think it was like a pretty iconic moment for anyone who is a fan of Star Trek to have been in that fitting room on that day to experience them being reunited, it was kind of wild.”

The wizard costume we see Wheaton in was traditional in some ways, at least traditional to the fantasy RPG world, but the material it was made of was only one way this costume designer made certain to create something for a peripheral character which demonstrated both her skillset and her dedication to the production. How did all of that come together?

“I wanted him in the wizard robe, but the funny part about it is the way that it was written, they wanted like a cream to white robe, and as I was researching it was leaning a little towards a group of individuals that we don’t want to highlight. So I made a board and I presented it to them, and I said I thought it was veering too far from what we’re trying to say. And they all agreed. So I did a bunch of research into cool wizard robes, we even looked for them in rental houses. But then we decided to build it. We swathed fabrics, one of my shoppers, her name is Alyssa Lesser and she’s like the best swatcher, brought me the most amazing navy velvet and brocade fabrics, like swirly prints that felt very celestial.”

“I’m on the podcast, there’s an HBO After the Show podcast, and mine is after Episode Five. I said it there, it’s very rare to get that creative freedom and I think when they trust the process and allow it to happen between me and Val, the production designer. I think that helped the flow of the show too. just allowing someone creative to be creative without restraints is like, chef’s kiss, especially this show’s world, I mean, it needs to be free and wild and zoomy.”

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