The red and blue pills in The Matrix. The Rosebud sled in Citizen Kane. Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction, contents unknown. The (real) severed horse head in The Godfather. Every sword, gun, wand and lightsaber that has been brandished by an actor on a screen or stage. What do these items have in common? Nothing, except that they are a tiny sample of the staggering range of objects, from the iconic to the instantly forgotten, known as props – or, to use their formal name, “properties”.
Props are, properly defined, anything used in a performance that is not part of the set or costumes. Sourcing or fabricating them is the job of a team overseen by the prop master; the term is gender-neutral, although the prim-sounding “prop mistress” is occasionally heard. It’s a massive undertaking, but not one that gets much attention. “It’s nice that you are asking about props, because they’re not really acknowledged,” says Jode Mann, a TV prop master in Los Angeles.
When Mann worked on the children’s comedy show Pee-wee’s Playhouse in the 1980s, she got a call from its star, Paul Reubens, who said he was nominating her for an Emmy. It was only after Mann told her mother – and promised to thank her if she won – that Reubens called back to say he couldn’t nominate her “because there’s no category for you”. There still isn’t. And while the Oscars has in recent years sought to celebrate behind-the-scenes efforts with new awards for casting and stunt work, prop mastery remains unrewarded.
Maybe it’s the sense that the job is overly logistical, or unspecialised. There is a lot of overlap with the set- and costume-design departments. But the work of a prop master is deeply creative: it is essential to the creation of a fictional universe. The real world is, after all, full of objects that we interact with (or ignore) constantly; props are what transform a staged set into a lived environment. By its nature, successful prop work will often blend into the background, but when something is wrong – the notorious obviously fake plastic baby in the 2014 war drama American Sniper, for instance – viewers take notice. The suspension of disbelief is broken. “If you take a baseball movie, you have nothing without bats, balls and gloves,” Mann says. “What do I do? I bring the life.”
It helps to have a good imagination. Not everything can be bought or rented from a prop house, which is especially true for genres such as sci-fi and fantasy. This is what attracts Jamie Wilkinson, a prop master whose credits include the two Wicked films and recent Star Wars sequels. “I’d much rather be creating crazy new world stuff,” he says.
For each job, Wilkinson assembles a crew of prop-makers – up to 100 – as well as specialists, depending on the story’s needs (he called in a chocolatier for Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka). His films often rely heavily on special effects, although he’s found that directors love it when a real prop can be used: “If the actors can physically see magic happening in front of them, you get a different response.”
Particular attention is paid to “hero props”: key pieces that get a lot of camera time, such as the broomstick carried by Elphaba, the green-faced antihero of Wicked. “We probably did 30 different designs,” Wilkinson says. The process took about 20 weeks, beginning with Wilkinson’s sketches, a selection of which were then sculpted in clay; early ideas included a plain “brutalist” chunk of raw wood. The final design, with its gnarled shaft composed of twisted roots, was chosen in close consultation with Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba; actors, Wilkinson tells me, often have a good instinct for the right props for their characters.
Just as much creative work goes into small-screen projects. Catherine Miller was prop master for Severance, the hit dystopian series revolving round a cultish corporation called Lumon Industries. All of Lumon’s office equipment was specially fabricated to fit the show’s retro-futuristic aesthetic. “We wanted to harken back to a time when offices were seen as a place of pride,” Miller explains – but with an added “cold, hard edge”.
For the computers, Miller’s team riffed on the design of the Data General Dasher, a line of terminals from the 1970s. The keyboards are missing an escape key – a “symbol” for the predicament of Lumon’s workers. Miller was delighted when fans on Reddit spotted this detail. “Anytime that I can endow metaphor on to the object, it’s just helping to reinforce the story that we’re telling,” she says. Cleverly designed props can do more than just decorate a narrative; they can drive it. The hardest part of the job? Getting the fabricated hardware to look as if it works normally on screen, which was sometimes done using remote controls – one of the many tasks that a props team will oversee during filming.
Stories set in the real world pose their own difficulties – authenticity is not as easy to achieve as it looks. Miller tells me that productions set in the recent past are the trickiest: the objects aren’t vintage enough to be collectible, nor modern enough to buy off the shelf. Nitpicking audiences are also particularly likely to notice anachronistic mistakes, such as a phone or computer model released years after the events depicted. For the 2019 thriller Uncut Gems, set in 2012, she struggled to source period-appropriate iPhones and laptops: “Sometimes we have to literally recreate the phones or modify a new laptop with an old clunky case.” The film’s most eye-catching prop of all was completely made from scratch: a golden, diamond-encrusted Furby pendant created with the help of a jewellery artist.
With historical projects, prop masters need to familiarise themselves with the facts. “I like the challenge of research,” says Vancouver-based Dean Eilertson, who thinks of himself as a “method prop master”. When he joined the drama series Shōgun, set in 1600s Japan, he worked with a historical adviser to learn about the period’s feudal culture. For the high-budget production he recruited three full-time buyers in Japan. They purchased nearly everything antique, from lacquer boxes to horse saddles for the samurai.
Then there were the samurai swords, required not just for the cast but for hundreds of background extras. “When you get your hands on a real Japanese sword, they’re heavy,” Eilertson explains – not to mention dangerous. When weapons are involved, the stakes couldn’t be higher, a lesson that was tragically illustrated by the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in 2021, when a live round was discharged from a prop revolver used by Alec Baldwin on the set of the film Rust. (The prop master, a 24-year-old with few industry credits, signed a cooperation agreement to avoid prosecution. Charges against Baldwin were dismissed, while the assistant director and armorer received criminal convictions.) In Shōgun, most of the swords we see are painted replicas in bamboo. On screen, you can’t tell the difference.
That’s another thing about props: they are forever blurring the line between real and fake. There are all sorts of reasons for this: budget, health and safety, availability. For the most part, prop masters have tried-and-true workarounds: synthetic gems, retractable needles, polystyrene-filled cakes, “chocolate” bars made of resin (the real thing would melt too quickly in an actor’s hands).
Fakery isn’t necessarily cheap. Retired prop master (and Jamie Wilkinson’s father) Barry Wilkinson remembers handling the famous Heart of the Ocean necklace worn by Kate Winslet in Titanic, designed by royal jewellers Asprey & Garrard. Its heart-shaped diamonds were actually blue cubic zirconias, but the hand-crafted necklace was still very expensive. Wilkinson senior personally transported the prop from Piccadilly to the film set in Canada for director James Cameron’s approval – though “because it cost so much, we couldn’t alter it”. Luckily, Cameron “loved it”.
Other times, prop masters get creative. Mann once went to a pet shop to buy a dog bone, which she wrapped in fondant and a layer of cheese, to replicate a raw chicken drumstick eaten by a zombie discovering their taste for human flesh. Recently, she worked with an actor who was intolerant to the lactose powder normally used to simulate cocaine. Coconut milk powder turned out to be too oily, so they settled on the sweetener sorbitol, ground with a pepper mill.
The results can be almost too convincing. One of the strangest incidents in Eilertson’s career took place on the set of the 2014 reboot of Godzilla. To fabricate two realistic replicas of nuclear missiles, he had gone deep in research, even consulting a retired nuclear scientist. In the film, the weapons are put on a train to be used in an attempt to destroy a newly discovered giant parasitic monster.
Although it was set in California, the transport scene was actually shot on Vancouver Island, with the train heading towards a Canadian military base. It so happened that about that time, news stories were circulating about nuclear threats from North Korea and the US response. And then, Eilertson says, “a Russian satellite takes a picture of our set and sends it to North Korea. Suddenly phones are ringing off the hook, because now apparently there’s proof that the US is moving missiles on Canadian soil. It was like: ‘Oh my God, that’s not what happened. That’s a movie set.’”
Onscreen props have a way of making it off set, too. After Titanic’s release, Asprey created an authentic version of their necklace with sapphire and diamonds, which Céline Dion wore to the Oscars. Elphaba’s broom can be bought online, with handmade versions on Etsy. For prop masters, witnessing their creations take on new lives can be satisfying – a rare moment of recognition for their work.
Recently, however, they have come up with a more concrete reward. In September 2024, the US-based Property Masters Guild (which was founded three years earlier to offer training and education, partly to help avoid tragedies such as Hutchins’ death) inaugurated its annual MacGuffin awards for film and TV. The event is named after the Hitchcockian device of an object – $40,000 in Psycho, government secrets on microfilm in North By Northwest – with no other purpose than to drive the plot forward.
In that first year, Mann, decades after her Emmy disappointment, was delighted to receive a MacGuffin for her work on the historical drama Lessons in Chemistry. “It touched a really deep part of my heart,” she says – not least because winners are chosen by their peers, who more than anyone understand how much the job involves. Perhaps the rest of the industry will now take notice.
