Coming into a series that has been on for two seasons doesn’t always leave a lot of room for new ideas, but costume designer Christina Flannery says she was thrilled with the opportunity to embellish and elevate the established characters for the third season of The Righteous Gemstones. “Time had passed, so we were able to show that the three siblings were taking over the church and I was able to push my own look into it for sure,” she says. “The costumes of season one and two are great, but I definitely think that my injection of these psychedelic neons and rhinestones took the baseline and allowed us to fold out the characters more.”
The main task was to dress the Gemstone siblings—Jesse (Danny McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson) and Kelvin (Adam DeVine)—as they take over their father’s megachurch. “For Jesse’s character, I spent more time leaning into the Tony Soprano kind of mobster, with higher-end designer pieces like Versace and Dolce & Gabbana.” Kelvin, the youth pastor, had an appearance change after Flannery did some research on popular TikTok preachers. “Before, he was kind of a Christian, rock band-type guy, but I decided to completely change him to be more like a sneaker-head. Then with Judy, she was already doing a lot of fun stuff so I was able to expand on it. I wanted to tie her in with the way I took Aimee-Leigh [Jennifer Nettles] in my season, so you could see Judy wearing a lot of her mother’s clothing.”
Flannery also had the challenge of dressing a clan of doomsday preppers, led by the siblings’ uncle Peter Montgomery (Steve Zahn). “It was so fun because it’s just like a hodgepodge, but there was so much research to do,” she says. “We had people in Ohio going to random little army surplus stores and we were able to just think about props, like, ‘What would they use? Wouldn’t it be cool if they had a welding mask to do this?’”
Though the Gemstones and Montgomerys were the main focus of the designs, Flannery says her absolute favorite costume was one for Baby Billy (Walton Goggins). “The oyster shell costume is probably one of the best costumes I’ve ever designed, period. The idea behind it was that he’s now living that Elvis in his last days, Liberace in Las Vegas kind of moment, so I was really inspired by older Wayne Newton and embellishing things. But I was like, ‘How am I going to do something that I haven’t really seen before?’ There was already this idea of capes and small shells, but then it was like, ‘What if we have him in a huge shell that’s just hard to move around in.’ In a way, he’s kind of his own mascot, which is just perfect for him.”
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