The Favourite is a film about power, and the monarchy, and sex, and women. It is also a film about gout, and wigs — really, really deranged wigs — and caked-on makeup that definitely contains lead, and anachronistic blue cake, and also gout.
Which is to say that The Favourite is a very weird film, and so when Melissa McCarthy and Brian Tyree Henry presented the award for Best Costume Design at this year’s Oscars, they spoofed it in equally weird outfits.
Wearing royal fur robes covered in more than a dozen stuffed rabbits, a wide-brim hat, and a ruff, McCarthy entered alongside Henry (in a multi-layered, multi-patterned dress, gloves, pearls, and a bow tie) in full-on Olivia Colman-as-Queen Anne cosplay. But of course, McCarthy takes The Favourite’s already gross aesthetic to its comedic extreme: The bunnies, which in the film symbolize one of the great tragedies of Queen Anne’s life, become part of the joke. Naturally, everyone was already laughing before the pair even spoke.
“These artists create a pastiche of textiles with authenticity yet never distract from the story,” McCarthy says while puppeteering one of the bunnies in her hand. “Costume designers construct the looks that ground a character to a particular time and place in the subtlest — subtlest of ways.”
Though The Favourite’s costume designer Sandy Powell, whom Vox recently interviewed, didn’t win the Oscar (that honor went, deservedly, to Black Panther costume designer Ruth Carter), the tribute brought a necessary moment of levity to the awards show. Watch it in the clip above.
