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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

LC graduate brings scary to the set of ‘American Horror Story’

For five seasons now, Mark Worthington’s fingerprints have been all over the FX series “American Horror Story.”

Except for the pilot, Worthington has served as the production designer for every episode. That means he’s the person responsible for the look of the series. The circus complex in last season’s “American Horror Story: Freak Show.” Briarcliff Manor, the horrific mental hospital at the center of season three’s “Asylum.” The antebellum Garden District manor house of “Coven” (season two), and now the Hotel Cortez, an art deco nightmare that’s home to a bloodthirsty Lady Gaga and a host of other horrors. Worthington helped dream those places up.

These elaborate horror houses are a far cry from the first theater set he ever built − for a production of “Inherit the Wind” that he also acted in at Lewis and Clark High School back in the 1970s.

“It was simple … but that was the first thing I ever designed for the stage,” he said by phone earlier this week from the Fox Studios set in Los Angeles. “I didn’t think at the time that that was what I was going to do. I wanted to be an artist.”

After graduating from LC in 1977, the Spokane native headed to Reed College in Portland. His intentions were toward the fine arts, but he ended up as a theater major, doing a lot of set design and directing. He and some friends ran a couple of small (and ultimately unsuccessful) theater companies in Portland in the 1980s before Worthington headed to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. There he got master’s degree in set and costume design, graduating in 1991. It was in Pittsburgh that he started working in film.

As a production designer, he’s worked on the series “Ugly Betty” and the Fox series “Scream Queens,” also from “AHS” creator Ryan Murphy. His credits include the pilots for “Lost,” “Battle Creek” and “Backstrom.” As an art director, he worked on the films “Legally Blonde 2” and “Austin Powers in Goldmember,” as well as “Hearts in Atlantis,” “Wag the Dog” and “Tombstone.” He’s been nominated five times for the Emmy for outstanding art direction, and earlier this year he won the Art Directors Guild award for excellence in production design – his third such award.

Worthington came to the attention of Murphy − who also created “Nip/Tuck” and “Glee” − after a planned job on the ABC series “Once Upon a Time” fell through. His agent told him about “Horror Story,” and Worthington thought it sounded like the most promising and interesting job out there. He’d never before met Murphy or any of the others at the table during the interview.

“He saw my stuff and they hired me,” Worthington said. “He liked something. I also came in with this really nice portfolio bag that I have. It’s felt. It’s very chic and nice, and he was like, ‘Very nice work. Your work is very nice. Really nice bag.’ Maybe it was me. Maybe it was the bag. Hard to say.”

For “Hotel,” Worthington and his team designed and built a multistory interior of an art deco hotel, complete with a working elevator. It’s handmade, custom work. The columns in the lobby, for instance, are topped with carvings of foliage – the Venus flytrap. It’s elaborate, and like the previous seasons of “AHS,” it was created in close collaboration between Worthington and Murphy.

“Ryan is obsessed with the visuals,” Worthington said. “The environments, the wardrobe, the hair, the makeup, the makeup effects, lighting, all of that.”

Before the season begins filming, and often before there’s even a finished script, Worthington and Murphy get together and talk ideas. Worthington then comes back with sketches and suggestions. From there they’ll “narrow the world” down, he said. “It’s a very traditional process, which doesn’t always happen,” he said. “With him, he’s very directly involved. … That said, he gives me a lot of latitude to come up with suggestions and ways to approach it.”

On “Hotel,” for instance, Worthington is the one who honed in on the art deco look for the Cortez. “He loved the deco thing,” Worthington said of Murphy.

Any mention of a haunted hotel can only bring up comparisons to the Overlook Hotel, where Jack Nicholson went mad in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” There are a few homages to the movie in “AHS,” including the carpet. It’s not exactly like the carpet in the Kubrick classic, but it’s clearly meant to evoke the Overlook. And that’s not the only film reference: A scene in the premiere episode Worthington calls a mashup of “Willie Wonka” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

While he can’t give anything away – it’s a tight-lipped set – Worthington can say that “AHS: Hotel” is very different from earlier seasons.

“It’s definitely more extreme and more scary,” he said. “It’s more psychological, darker than either ‘Coven’ or ‘Freak Show,’ and scarier.”