Bonus: I Used to Be an Artist at Madame Tussauds

Summary

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Podcast Summary: How to Be Anything

Episode: Bonus: I Used to Be an Artist at Madame Tussauds

Host: Emily McCrary
Guest: Bree Hayden
Date: July 25, 2025

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Overview

This special bonus episode of "How to Be Anything" profiles Bree Hayden, who worked as a studio artist at Madame Tussauds in Washington D.C. from 2018 to 2020. The episode gives a behind-the-curtain look at maintaining the wax figures, the artistic and technical challenges involved, and the reality of working with uncanny, lifelike statues. Bree also discusses her path from this unusual job into full-time independent art, ultimately crafting hyperrealistic bottle illustrations for celebrity collectors and exploring her own artistic passions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Bree Became a Wax Figure Artist

• Background Search: Bree was looking for art jobs after moving back to the U.S., coming across the Madame Tussauds post seeking portfolios with "realism, attention to detail, and prior experience with wigs or sculpting wax."

  “Who has that? ... I have always loved doing art, I had plenty of artwork to show them that showed my skill range in terms of understanding colors and understanding realism... I did do a few pieces right before applying where I was doing these little miniature skin studies on wax paper.” – Bree Hayden (02:04)

• Portfolio & Interview: Bree submitted pieces demonstrating realism, such as miniature skin studies on wax paper, her closest prior experience.
• Landing the Job: She was offered the position quickly after the interview, opting for art over her science degree background.

2. A Day in the Life at Madame Tussauds

• Early Mornings & Routine:

  “I had to be at work every day at 6am... waking up at 4:30 every day, which never got easier. I loved the job though, so it was, it was okay.” – Bree Hayden (03:30)

• Uncanny Encounters:

  • Entering a dark, silent museum at dawn, surrounded by lifelike statues, was eerie until she acclimated.
  • Bree recounts a frightening moment when she thought a wax figure (Harriet Tubman) moved on its own – until her colleague revealed it was him.

    “Out of the corner of my eye I see Harriet Tubman, the wax figure, just move into the doorway... for a split second I thought I was seeing a ghost.” – Bree Hayden (05:10)

• Team Ritual: Bree and her colleague greeted each other every morning to avoid startling one another in the figure-filled museum.

3. Wax Figure Maintenance & Artistic Technique

• Daily Upkeep: Each figure, often nearly 100 on display, required daily inspection for marks, lint, disarranged hair, or paint touch-ups.

• Handling and Repair:

  • Figure heads were detachable for hair washing and styling.

  “Their head actually comes off of their bodies. So I would take their head off, bring it into the back studio, give them a shampoo, condition, curl their hair, hairspray... it was like playing with dolls really.” – Bree Hayden (06:22)

• Major Restoration: Figures would periodically be taken behind the scenes for weeks of full restoration, including repainting, smoothing divots, and inserting new hair or eyelashes.

  • Highly technical: oil painting built with splatter techniques for skin realism; wax warmed for hair insertion.
  • Memorable Accident: A colleague accidentally melted a wax figure (left lamp on), and they repurposed the ruined statue as a “zombie” for a Halloween display.

    “The figure's eye was just totally melted down to their chin. It was destroyed. But we made the most of it.” – Bree Hayden (09:39)

4. Inside the Madame Tussauds Process & Celebrity Interactions

• Non-Disclosure Realities: Bree had to sign an NDA due to sensitive celebrity reference material.

• Behind-the-Scenes in London: Bree visited the London studio, discovering entire departments dedicated to specialized details like eyes and teeth.

  “It might be the sculpting, it might be just the eyeballs, it might be just the teeth. All of these departments are super specialized…” – Bree Hayden (12:13)

• Working with Binders: Each figure has a detailed binder: measurements, preferred poses/outfits, hair/makeup as per historical or iconic moments.

• Moon Landing Exhibit: In 2019, for the 50th anniversary, Bree restored astronaut figures for a new display and appeared on local news – leading to an unexpected brush with Kevin Bacon.

  “I look next to me and it’s Kevin Bacon and his brother, real Kevin Bacon and his brother, not wax figures who were on set at the news the same day as I was.” – Bree Hayden (14:33)

• Transporting Rosa Parks: To shoot social media photos of the Rosa Parks figure at D.C. landmarks, Bree covertly carted her on a dolly, covered in a sleeping bag, and fielded concerned questions from confused bystanders.

5. Transitioning to Independent Art

• Pandemic Pivot: Bree left Madame Tussauds as COVID-19 hit, launching her art business amidst industry closures.

• Marketing through Celebrities:

  "I thought if I could sell to a celebrity quickly, then that would help me get a lot of eyes on my work." – Bree Hayden (16:51)

  • Targeted and succeeded in selling to a celebrity athlete via Instagram.
  • Leveraged the trend of celebrity liquor brands: drew hyperrealist bottle portraits and tagged public figures to build her collector base (including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Brett Ratner).

• Current Focus: Bree now works full-time drawing antique bottles in pencil, enjoying the technical challenge of reflections, paper textures, and fonts—all freehand, no stencils.

  “I don’t do any sort of tracing or stencil work. I just start from the top and sort of work my way down a piece... I’ve always loved pushing myself to try to do better at what I’m able to do already.” – Bree Hayden (18:47)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the uncanny realism of wax figures:

  “I do have this memory of looking at one of the wax figures up close, straight in the eye and getting slightly freaked out because they look so real. My brain knew it was essentially a statue but I felt like it could move at any moment.” – Bree Hayden (04:07)

• On wax figure restoration:

  “The paint job on their skin is a splatter painting technique that needs to be built up very slowly over time. Oil paint takes a long time to dry, so that’s why these took a couple of weeks to revamp.” – Bree Hayden (07:55)

• On making the most of accidents:

  “One of the wax figures was destroyed, just totally melted from the lamp... But we made the most of it.” – Bree Hayden (09:50)

• On launching a career in independent art:

  “Because there’s so much fan art out there, I honed in on this as a way to target them in a more unique way... I liked the challenge of mimicking all of the different fonts that you come across.” – Bree Hayden (17:28)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:26 – Bree introduces herself and her role at Madame Tussauds
• 03:30 – Early mornings, acclimating to the museum, and spooky first days
• 05:10 – The Harriet Tubman “ghost” moment
• 06:22 – Daily maintenance: headless hairdressing and paint touch-ups
• 09:30 – Major restoration, painting techniques, and the melted zombie figure
• 12:13 – Description of the Madame Tussauds studio in London, division of labor
• 13:50 – Moon landing exhibit and meeting Kevin Bacon
• 14:50 – Smuggled Rosa Parks photoshoot story
• 16:51 – Leaving Madame Tussauds and launching an art career via Instagram
• 18:47 – Bree describes her current bottle-focused, hyperrealistic artwork

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Original Language & Tone

Bree’s tone is warm, candid, and full of gentle humor—she is reflective about both the technical challenges and the absurdity of the job. The narrative is conversational, peppered with relatable anecdotes about early mornings, uncanny wax figures, and career pivots prompted by global change.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a fascinating, tactile account of what it means to be a guardian of wax celebrities—melding art, craft, and human oddity—and how creative people repurpose their specialized skills to thrive in entirely new ways. Bree Hayden’s story is humorous, humble, and a testament to both adaptability and artistic intuition.

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For more images and details, see the show's Substack or Instagram (@howtobeanything).

Transcript

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[Emily McCrary]

Hey listeners, the people we typically feature on how to Be Anything are those currently making their living doing something unusual. But as I was reporting, I kept coming across people who used to have really unusual jobs and I really didn't want to leave them out. So we've put together a few bonus episodes. We'll be dropping throughout season one, but we're going to release them randomly so subscribe and you won't miss one. Okay, here's Bri.

[Bree Hayden]

My name is Bre Hayden and I was a studio artist for Madame Tussauds from 2018 to 2020. I worked in Washington D.C. and my job was to maintain the wax figures which meant to keep them looking pristine from day to day and throughout my time there. So I was looking for an art related job when I had moved back to the United States and found the job posting on one of the job posting sites and they were looking for you to apply with a portfolio. I remember what was funny about the job posting was that it was looking for prior experience with things related to the job of course, which meant maybe working with wigs or working with sculpting wax, which I felt like, who has that? Because I have always loved doing art, I had plenty of artwork to show them that showed my skill range in terms of understanding colors and understanding realism and how to use shadow and lighting really turned something into looking hyper realistic. I chose pieces that you could really understand, my attention to detail and interest in high quality craftsmanship. I did do a few pieces right before applying where I I was doing these little miniature skin studies on wax paper. I thought this is the closest thing I can get to what I might be doing at the job. So anytime you're doing a little small focus in art. It's referred to as a study. So yeah, it was just sort of focused on. That is the only aspect of this little piece of art. Studying the skin and studying the colors of it. I knew that the wax figures were obviously three dimensional and in a type of wax that I had never worked with before. But that was just the idea in my head. Let me try to see what it's like painting on wax. That was the only material I had available to me so I just gave it a try. So I went into their studio in D.C. they looked over my portfolio, toured me around the art studio and I think I got a call only two days later or so saying that they wanted to offer me the job. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into art, which has always been something that I loved, or science, which is what I had gotten my degree in. So when I had been looking for this job I was keyword searching on job sites, both science related things and art. And I had landed on this one which felt like a dream job at the time. I grew up in Northern Virginia so I had temporarily moved back into my parents and I had to be at work every day at 6am So I metroed in which meant I had to take the first train of the day at 5. Waking up at 4:30 every day, which never got easier. I, I loved the job though, so it was, it was okay. First day. I remember my colleague, the other artist who worked there, I mean he was giving me sort of an orientation on what to do. And I do have this memory of looking at one of the wax figures up close, straight in the eye and getting slightly freaked out because they look so real. My brain knew it was essentially a statue but I felt like it could move at any moment. So it took a little bit of getting used to to really be able to look at these wax figures as closely as I needed to. Also coming into the wax museum at six in the morning, it's still dark out. So there's like a little bit of an eerie tone to it when you're first starting and getting used to it, but quickly because my job was to really look at these figures up close and analyze them and take them apart. I got used to it right away and then started seeing them more like still life statues almost. So the way that the Washington D.C. madame Tussauds is set up is that it's a full circle. When you come in, you go through the attraction as a circle and the other artist and I Sort of had this unspoken rule that when you come in in the morning, that we would first say hi to each other. So we knew that we were there because we could sort of go around the whole attraction and not ever see each other, essentially. So we'd come in, find the other person, say hello to make sure we didn't spook them. But I remember one morning I was going around, I have to look at every single wax figure, head to toe. So I'm, you know, very focused and out of the corner of my eye I see Harriet Tubman, the wax figure, just move into the doorway. And my colleague hadn't said hello yet, so my brain, of course, knew that she wasn't real. But for a split second I thought I was seeing a ghost. I was like, oh my God, what is happening? Like I couldn't make any sense of it. And then I see him pop up behind her and he goes, oh, I just got here, I didn't see you yet. He had needed to move her for some reason, but I remember my whole. My blood went cold. I knew it wasn't real, but I couldn't make any sense of it. Yeah, that spooked me. Each of the figures needs to be looking pristine every single day. So when you go to Madame Tussauds, the figures are meant to be interacted with gently, of course. But you do have children coming into the wax attraction, so they might touch their hair, mess up their hairstyle, or occasionally you'll get fingernail marks in the wax. All of the wax figures are painted with oil paint, so the oil from your hands will slowly start to take the paint off. So I would go around every morning to each wax figure, I think we had about a hundred on display, and look at them from head to toe, figure out what needed just small touch ups. They might need a shoe shine, they might need a lint roll, but there were always figures that needed more of a touch up, where I would take pieces of them apart back into the studio, fix them up before the museum opened at 10 in the morning. So that's why I had to get there so early because this was daily maintenance. And sometimes they would need a full hair refresh in the morning before we open. So I. Their head actually comes off of their bodies. So I would take their head off, bring it into the back studio, give them a shampoo condition, curl their hair, hairspray, it was like playing with dolls really, and return them back to how they should be looking before we opened each morning. So that was the part of the daily Maintenance of the job, as I mentioned, because the paint will start to slowly come off over time from oils, from your hands. Some of the fact. The wax figures would need to be fully stripped down of their paint and redone from scratch from time to time. So we would take them off display for maybe two to four weeks. And this was my favorite part of the job, where I would strip off all of their paint. Then you go in very slowly and really look at every little bit of surface on their skin, on their face, and maybe fix little divots that have gotten there over time, smooth it out. They might need new eyelashes inserted. They might need new hair along their hairline inserted, and then slowly build up the paint. So the paint job on their skin is a splatter painting technique that needs to be built up very slowly over time. Oil paint takes a long time to. To dry, so that's why these took a couple of weeks to revamp. But that was my favorite part of the job because I got to take them. Although they were looking nice on the museum floor, once you took them into the harsh studio lighting, you could see that they needed more maintenance. So that was my favorite part of the job. It was a lot of color theory. It was a lot of trump l', oeil, which is an art term that means it's a trick of the eye where you can get something just using color and shadow to really fake your eyes into thinking that something is realistic. So it involved a lot of technical skills. So I liked the challenge of that part. So when you're doing hair insertion, you need the wax to be a little bit warm so that you're not making. If you could imagine poking a candle, it might get sort of white if the wax is cold. So we would have this lamp that warmed the wax just a little bit so you could more easily insert hair. My colleague accidentally left the lamp on and went to a meeting and came back, and one of the wax figures was destroyed, Just totally melted from the lamp. And we were not able to salvage it, but what we were able to do was turn it into a Halloween figure. So as long as the wax figure is no longer recognizable as the celebrity or historical figure that they were, because you don't want to put them in a bad light, as long as they're totally unrecognizable, we were able to shift it into something else. So we created a Halloween attraction with this zombie. I mean, the figure's eye was just totally melted down to their chin. It was destroyed. It was destroyed. But we made the Most of it.

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[Bree Hayden]

So when I was working here, I was signed into an NDA. So there are some celebrities who are very, I don't know, quite the right word, but they want to make sure that their image is exactly how they want it to always be. So we had to follow certain guidelines for some celebrities and we had all of these photos of them. In particular celebrities without makeup on or very up close visuals that they didn't want out in the press. So that's why I had to sign an NDA to make sure I wasn't going to be sharing any of those photos. All of the wax figures are made in a studio in London and then they're shipped to the different attractions around the world where the studio artists at each location is doing the maintenance on the figures like I was doing. I visited London, I think two falls ago, and I had contacted the Madame Tussauds there where they were able to give me a tour of the studio where all of the figures were made, which was so, so cool. They have multiple floors that are all dedicated to different aspects. So it might be the sculpting, it might be just the eyeballs, it might be just the teeth. So all of these departments that are super specialized in just their whatever it is they're creating, they'll take all of these measurements about them and talk to them about what outfit they want to be shown in, their specific hairstyle, their makeup, and it's usually based off of something recognizable for the celebrity, like a red carpet event that everyone saw their photo at, something you might be able to recognize for them. Some of the celebrities are not able to come in. So one of the sculptors was working on a wax figure and he was doing the entire thing based off of googled photos of the celebrity, which was amazing in terms of how much technical skill that takes, everything needs to be sized correctly. So he had to try to get photos from all different angles. And you'll be looking at how certain things line up on this celebrity's face to make sure you can work out the dimensions and perspective on it. It was really fascinating. All of the wax figures have a full binder that covers everything that their wax figure needs to look like. It'll show examples of the hairstyles, it'll show maybe a makeup palette, it'll show exact costumery. So we can refer back to that to see how she was when she was first launched, which could have been a while ago. And it's also based off of historic photos. So they. So Madame Tussauds has chosen one of Rosa Parks to try to match exactly her outfit, her hairstyle, her glasses, things like that. And then we did have some figures that had been off of display for a couple of years that we brought back out again. And they needed a lot of maintenance just because they hadn't been looked at in quite a while. So when I was working there in 2019, it was the 50th year anniversary of the moon landing. We recreated the attraction of the astronauts. We had Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and they had been in storage for a long time. So I was the one getting the astronauts ready again. Some of their suits had yellowed over time, so we had to source more fabric from them or certain patches to make sure that they were exactly how they would have been that might have gotten damaged over time. We were launching these astronauts back into a new exhibit at the museum and I got to take them on the local news. I was on set with this woman from NASA. So the science community was really excited about celebrating the 50th year anniversary. And when I got off the news set, the news anchor came up to me and said, oh, would you like a photo? And I thought she met with her and I didn't really know who she was, but I was being polite and I thought, oh, oh, thank you. Yeah, I would love a photo. And so she ushers me up next to the wax figures that I had brought and she's the one taking the photo. And I look next to me and it's Kevin Bacon and his brother, real Kevin Bacon and his brother, not wax figures who were on set at the news the same day as I was. So I got to meet them, which was fun. I had a few instances where I got to do some strange things because of the job that led me to other adventures. One of my colleagues and I wanted to take photos of Rosa Parks in front of some of the D.C. monuments. But we did not want to make a big deal out of it. We didn't want people taking photos of her. So we went out with her wax figure. She's a seated wax figure. And we put her on a dolly, and we covered her in a sleeping bag so no one knew what we were carting around the city. We didn't have any sort of Madame Tussauds logos on us or anything. And we would take her out into the median, quickly, rip off the sleeping bag, take some photos of her in front of the Capitol or something like that, put the sleeping bag back on. And we were doing this to try to get some good photos for us to use for social media. And this woman came up to me and said she was looking at the Rosa Parks figure, and she goes, excuse me, is she okay? Do you need help? And I didn't want to tell her who we were. And this wax figure looks so realistic and out of context, I don't think you'd really recognize it as Rosa Parks. You know, she's. She's not around. And so I just said, oh, yeah, she's fine. And the person gave me the weirdest look and walked away. So I left in 2020, right as the pandemic was hitting. I mean, museums everywhere were closing, and I loved that job. I was so sad to leave, but I guess, you know, it was sort of a time for something else. That's when I went out on my own as an independent artist. I had been looking for jobs, but no one was hiring. So I sort of took it as a sign and an opportunity to go out on my own. I had this idea in my head to try to get a lot of eyes on my work really quickly in order to be able to do this full time. So I had this idea where I. I thought if I could sell to a celebrity quickly, then that would help me get a lot of eyes on my work. And so I had this celebrity athlete in my head that I wanted to target. So I drew something that I thought that he'd be interested in, posted a photo to Instagram, tagged him, the business people involved in this product, and was able to sell to them. So I think I sold to them in. In March of 2020. So it happened way quicker than I had expected. There's a trend that you might be aware of where there's so many celebrities are backing their own liquor brands. Because there's so much fan art out there, I honed in on this as a way to target them in a more unique way. So I was drawing a couple different celebrity liquor brands. The first person I was targeting, that was the first real large drawing that I had done. And as I mentioned, they purchased the piece. And so I started doing a few more of these to see if I could get more eyes on my work. And it did lead to some other celebrity collectors. So Dwayne Johnson, Dwayne the Rock Johnson has a few of my pieces. He has a tequila brand that he square created. I also have a celebrity collector, Brett Ratner. He's a Hollywood producer and director. He has his own Hillhaven Lodge whiskey. So I was doing these commissioned pieces. It started to become commissions for celebrities. They were reaching out to me. And so I was doing bottle drawing after bottle drawing after bottle drawing. And I really liked them as a subject. I was doing them in this really hyper realistic style where I could play with the lighting on the glass. And I liked the challenge of mimicking all of the different fonts that you come across. And then sort of over time, as I've put my own spin on continuing to draw bottles, I've transitioned into drawing mostly antique bottles. So that's what I'm doing now. I do all sorts of antique champagne bottles, apothecary bottles, a lot of pre prohibition whiskeys. And I'm doing that full time. And I do these pieces in pencil on paper, so everything's done freehand, which is pretty unique for. For that style. I don't do any sort of tracing or stencil work. I just start from the top and sort of work my way down a piece. And I have always loved a technical challenge. I've always loved pushing myself to try to do better at what I'm able to do already. And so with bottles, and in particular antique bottles, there are so many different components to them that offer a challenge to me. So a lot of different textures. There's reflection on glass, there's wrinkles in the paper, staining, different foil maybe around the top of the bottle. And I come across so many different fonts. So I'm mimicking these without any stencil work, which I like challenging myself. I think it's fun to try to just do these as exact as I can.

[Emily McCrary]

How to Be Anything is written by me, Emily McCrary. Our producer is Lily I. Johnson, and our editor is Kathy Kaden Boffman. Visual design by Nika Simovich Fisher. At Labud, you can see pictures of Bree and Kevin Bacon, plus pictures of our other guests and details about their work on our substack howtobeanything.com or on our Instagram how to Be Anything. If you have an idea for a job you think we should look into, let us [e-mail].

[Capella University Announcer]

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella. Edu.

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I'm Eden Share and I'm Brock Charlelli.

[Eden Scher]

We played best friends on the Middle.

[Brock Ciarlelli]

And became best friends in real life.

[Eden Scher]

We're here to rewatch the Middle with all of you.

[Brock Ciarlelli]

Each week we'll recap an episode with behind the scenes stories, guest interviews, and what we think now, many years later.

[Eden Scher]

There'S a lot to dive into. So let's get to middling.

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