The Hollywood Food Stylist Behind the Scenes of Popular Films and TV

Behind the scenes with Hollywood’s food stylist

On an early morning in March, well before the strikes began, McSorley pulled into the parking lot of a distinctly unglamorous part of Santa Clarita — an industrial-park-turned-soundstage.

She unloaded her SUV, packed as tightly as a perfectly played Tetris game, pulling out electric burners and what looked like a contractor’s tool bag. Instead of hammers and drills, it held hundreds of kitchen utensils, from tongs and torches to measuring cups and cutting boards.

McSorley moves around a lot, working on different sets most days, so she carries all her tools with her. On this particular set, she was assigned a designated space for her work kitchen — a treat — because the show, Hulu’s Good Trouble, features a character who is opening a restaurant. Food is central to the show’s plot.

Before they started filming, the space was an empty shell with ceiling insulation exposed, McSorley said. But crews built a half-dozen huge plywood boxes that each hold a completely realistic room, like an office or a den.

“So many people touched all of this before you could even think about putting food into this set,” McSorley said, with awe. 

She made sure everything on the commercial kitchen set was perfect before filming began the next day when actors were expected to flip burgers and stir polenta. The set was incredibly realistic, from rubber mats covering the floor to food containers labeled with blue painter’s tape. Except, it wasn’t a real kitchen.

“One thing about a set, it doesn’t have practical lighting,” McSorley said. “Any light switches you see don’t really work.”

She had to use the flashlight on her phone to complete her inspection.

An unlikely career

Food styling is not the job McSorley thought she’d have.

She grew up in Burbank, home to many studios, but her family wasn’t involved in entertainment at all.

“My mom had office jobs,” McSorley said. “In fact, when I was little, she was a telephone operator. I don’t even think that exists anymore.”

Her stepfather owned a printing company in North Hollywood. But the entertainment industry was all around. As a girl, she remembers driving past fans lining up to watch The Tonight Show being taped.

“There was [an actors’] strike that happened when I was in high school, and it affected a lot of the families that I grew up with,” she said.

That’s when she told her family that she would never work in entertainment.

“I never wanted to work in an industry where people were so expendable,” she said. “Nobody cared how many lives these strikes could disrupt. And so, I was never, ever, ever going to be in this industry.”

Melissa was a kid with a creative streak, growing up in a structured home.

“When I was in high school, I actually wanted to go to school for photography, and my parents said that I could do that as a hobby any time I wanted,” she said.

McSorley will then swap out that dough for another that’s been perfectly shaped.

“Then, you might see her start to sauce it. Then, you might see it finished, but uncooked,” she said. “At the very, very end of the scene, she’ll pull out that perfect pizza.”

And to make sure that shot is just right, McSorley will have three or four perfect pizzas prepped — just in case.

Her job depends on making sure that food looks as delicious as possible, and that it looks identical, take after take.

A bizarre set of skills

What’s clear is that a Hollywood food stylist needs an eclectic array of skills that go way beyond cooking.

First, they have to be organized. Even the simplest scene has many moving parts. One pivotal scene in the 2015 film Love the Coopers, for example, took place around a Christmas dinner table.

McSorley said the scene took nine days to shoot and in that time they went through more than 50 turkeys. There were full, perfect turkeys, turkeys staged just for carving, turkeys that fell on the floor, turkeys that the dog came too close to, and even turkeys in the oven. McSorley had to find them, buy them, store them and cook them.

“There were a lot of turkeys,” she said, shaking her head.

Second, a food stylist needs to be a nutritionist — and a problem-solver. In that same scene in Love the Coopers, stars like Diane Keaton, John Goodman, Marisa Tomei and Alan Arkin all sat together.

“When you went around the table, there was a vegetarian who loves cheese; a vegan that also doesn’t do sugar or sugar substitutes; [and] other people who ate no carbs,” McSorley said. “You have to make sure that you’ve made something that everybody can eat.”

Third, food stylists are often technical advisors, making sure kitchens on set seem real to viewers. They’ll organize a fictional restaurant’s fridge according to safety regulations, with raw meat on the bottom level, not sitting on top of produce, for instance.

Amplifying scenes with food

“The highlights of my career are the times when I’ve been able to do something that is, like, so amplified,” McSorley said.

Like the time she dug into research for a period-perfect meal in Mad Men or Perry Mason or making food for imaginary worlds.

On the vampire drama True Blood, McSorley’s first task was to concoct a substance worthy of the show’s title — a drink that actors could gulp down, that also looked and functioned like blood, not juice.

“It had to leave a trail when it went down the glass,” she said, “And so, that was a lot of fun, using a little bit of wheatgrass to give it the opaqueness that it needed, and then to add a little bit of methyl cellulose to get the viscosity that it needed.”

She added pomegranate-cherry juice to get the right color and to lend it a decent taste.

“It was like a little chemistry experiment in the kitchen,” she said. 

McSorley also created the food seen in science-fiction shows like Star Trek: Picard or The Book of Boba Fett. And that’s not as simple as it might seem.