Can you make me thinner?” the reality-TV mogul Andy Cohen asked. It was a hot July day in 2023, and Cohen was in a Manhattan photo studio, awaiting a session in which employees of the Madame Tussauds wax museum would take his measurements. He looked down at the purple T-shirt and yellow shorts he had on. “Sorry for my outfit,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t read the e-mail carefully.”
Eight technicians in black T-shirts buzzed around a table strewn with cameras; another held a small briefcase of glass eyeballs.
“Do I have to donate blood to Madame Tussaud?” Cohen asked, eying the eyeballs.
“We now own you,” Matthew Clarkson, a Tussauds marketing executive, replied. Clarkson advised a quick wardrobe change, and, once Cohen had put on a gray tank top and shorts, he was directed to sit in the blue swivel chair that had been U-Hauled over from his “Watch What Happens Live” set. After consulting a briefing sheet, Cohen sat and assumed the decreed position:
POSE: Sitting with right ankle crossed over left knee. Arms resting on the arms of the chair, holding interview cards in his RH [right hand]. Head slightly tilted to side, as per expression.
EXPRESSION: Smiling with his teeth, gaze looking out towards guests with a slight head tilt.
Once Cohen settled, the team descended like a Nascar pit crew to take his measurements: radius of cranium, distance between eyes, width of nostrils. Some used metal calipers, of the same type that the actual Marie Tussaud had employed in eighteenth-century France; others used a portable 3-D scanner, which Madame Tussaud did not.
Cohen sat perfectly still, although some celebrities have opted for more animated poses: Tony Hawk’s waxwork showed him in the air on a skateboard, which meant that, at his sitting, he had to lie on his back, legs thrust skyward, for two hours.
There’s no rigid formula for who gets a wax replica in one of the twenty-three Tussauds around the world. (Kylie Jenner has two; Margot Robbie, none.) Tussaud herself used attendance as the metric, a value system that has endured. Last year, around ten million people visited a Madame Tussauds location. Only the very, very busy—or the dead—don’t come in for a formal sitting. Jimmy Fallon and Beyoncé sat. The Queen sat nine times.
After thirty minutes, Cohen and his chair were rotated ten degrees and measured again. “The chair has a hard out,” one of two publicists named Courtney said. Three hours later, the chair was hustled from the building, and Cohen followed soon afterward.
“It’s funny that I’m being immortalized at my ice-cream-and-cheeseburger weight,” he concluded.
Thirteen months later, in August, Cohen met his wax doppelgänger for the first time, at the Madame Tussauds on Forty-second Street. Since the measuring session, artists had begun creating the figure in London, in a four-story complex that turns out almost two hundred likenesses a year. There’s a serene sculpting room for clay heads and fibreglass bodies; a steampunk-ish mold shop; cubicles for hairstyling and coloring which evoke an old-fashioned beauty salon; and a 3-D-printing room for accessories.
While Cohen was being fabricated there, his half-built companions included Timothée Chalamet, whose clay head (built three per cent larger than life-size, to allow for shrinkage) gazed from a plinth, and Selena Gomez, whose plaster head mold sat on the floor in the wax shop. A carton of sleeping bags was at the ready, not for all-nighters but to pad the finished figures when they’re packed into coffin-like crates for shipping.
In Madame Tussaud’s day, the wax statues actually broke news about what famous people looked like; her museum was the People magazine of its time. When the Revolution broke out, the mob marched wax heads through Paris on pikes. (Today’s guests are less violent, though, in 2019, an upset guest did stomp on Diddy’s decapitated head.)
When Cohen showed up to inspect (and approve) his wax image in New York, he found it propped between Lucille Ball and Fallon. “O.K., this is freaky,” he announced, causing a museum employee to wince. (“Freaky” and “scary” are words they don’t like to hear.) “Wow, you know what? I don’t look too bad.” He examined the Dolce & Gabbana shoes and other details. “They did a good job with the teeth,” he said. (He’d had impressions made at his dentist’s.) “They got the one dimple right.” He patted his wax head admiringly. “This is what I look like,” he said. Then he sat down next to himself, in a replica of the blue guest chair on his set.
Before the figure would go on display, it made its début on Cohen’s show, broadcast from the Bravo Clubhouse, downtown. After the taping, two Tussauds employees disassembled the wax man, first making sure that no civilians were in the room. In seconds, Cohen’s head and hands were removed. The rest of him was placed on a cart and rolled out to a loading dock.
The waxwork Cohen is hardy enough to delight would-be real housewives in perpetuity. The replica guest chair won’t last that long, owing to wear and tear from selfie-seeking visitors. As one of Cohen’s staff said, of the real chair, “We can only clean so much bronzer off of it.” ♦
