Kate Hawley spent decades building imaginary worlds. Hollywood finally noticed

Saturday, 13 June 2026

From opera rehearsals in Wellington to Hollywood’s biggest stage, Oscar-winning designer Kate Hawley reflects on a career spent creating worlds, the misunderstood art of costume design, and why success changes less than people think. By André Chumko.

In mid-March, inside Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California, Kate Hawley is discovering what happens after you win an Oscar.

Having just won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Hawley, a Wellingtonian, is swept through a highly choreographed procession of photographers, press rooms, white-gloved handlers and after-parties.

The achievement followed her winning the BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design earlier in the awards season. It not only crowned a decades-long career, but also shone a global spotlight on the creative expertise of Aotearoa’s world-leading screen and theatre industry talent.

“They make everyone who’s won an Oscar feel amazing. It’s slick,” Hawley tells The Post via video link from Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she is working on Bad Bridgets, a period thriller by director Rich Peppiatt (Kneecap).

“It’s almost a bit like going on a ghost train. Because you go from one thing to another, and then you have your photo at this booth, and then someone leads you here, and you sign this, and then you do that, and then you walk the corridor, and then you go into another press room. It goes on forever. It’s quite amazing. And then suddenly you get pushed out at the end like a sausage.”

Accompanied by her daughter Ruby, Hawley remembers emerging from the auditorium to an applauding crowd, astonished at her widespread recognition. “Then I realised … those poor people get paid to do that,” she laughs.

The Oscar serves as the key to get in to all the most glamorous events around the city of angels that night - entry is forbidden without the golden award, which yes, is even verified for authenticity by attendants upon entry.

“I have a theory that you could almost murder someone with it that night,” Hawley says.

“I had my agent and everyone I love packed into the car as tight as possible. … It’s hilarious, because you go, ‘Really, is this how it works?’ I’ve never been in that position. Suddenly everyone’s clinging onto you, so they can go through the magic.

“It’s nuts, isn’t it? But it’s long gone. I had these smart-arse little comments from home, going, ‘Hope you got your feet back on the ground’. Dude, my feet were on the ground the next day. … Look, I’ve been around long enough to go, that was a beautiful moment, but now it’s back to the work. But it was amazing.”

From Wellington to the world

Born in 1970 to Marjan Van Waardenberg, of Dutch heritage, and Timothy Hawley, who are now divorced, Kate grew up in the leafy central Wellington suburb of Kelburn, one of four siblings.

Hawley attended Kelburn Normal School, then private girls’ school Samuel Marsden Collegiate in the suburb of Karori in the 1980s, before studying design at Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University), graduating in the early 90s. In the mid-90s, she completed London’s legendary Motley Theatre Design Course, which no longer runs.

Growing up with a touring opera singer father, and a mother who’d help take care of the frocks (which 5-year-old Kate would spill Diet Coke on), Hawley’s design work began almost by osmosis, as she was always surrounded by her parents’ deep love of music, theatre, opera and literature.

“I remember curling up in one of those big old chairs in the living room, and my mother would put the record player on for The Wizard of Oz, and I’d sit there and imagine everything. We’d go and see Dad in an opera and be involved in that world. Mum would read us a book and that world would be open to us. I’ve been totally encouraged to believe in the make-believe, really,” she says.

With nothing to do, Hawley sat in on her Dad’s opera rehearsals, and eventually got so bored that she started helping with props and scene painting. She learned from a huge number of people including the director Peter Coates, who produced television operas for TVNZ.

At 14, Hawley remembers being told by a prop-maker she could actually do it as a real job. “Which is kind of a big lie, in a way … but it was the first time that someone said that. It never occurred to me.”

At 16, she remembers set designer Tony Rabbit and director Colin McColl coming to speak to students about their production of Romeo and Juliet - “that was another moment where I just went, f… this, I’m going into the world of theatre”.

Hawley was always involved in school productions, and had supportive teachers at Marsden - even when she’d skip class to spend time at the opera or at one of the city’s many theatres: Downstage, Circa, BATS.

She’d usher and work backstage, doing any and every job for nothing. “I did a lot of bad stuff, but with moments of brilliance. But I learned things through it. It was amazing to be in that community.”

In the years that led up to Frankenstein, Hawley worked as a costume or set designer for New Zealand Opera, the New Zealand International Arts Festival (now the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts), the Royal New Zealand Ballet and the Auckland Theatre Company.

She’s taught at Toi Whakaari, the NZ Drama School, and worked on films including Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and The Hobbit series, Del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013), plus Suicide Squad (2016), Mortal Engines (2018), and too many others to list here, plus The Rings of Power television series.

The invisible architecture of storytelling

Costume design is a unique art form in that it’s so highly visible, yet its workers are firmly behind the scenes. When it’s done well, an audience might not even notice it at all.

Hawley describes costume as an active, three-dimensional part of the performance that’s mostly about supporting a director’s vision.

Ultimately, any job starts with the script, with all its ideas and images.

“The first time you’re seeing it as an audience member, is when you’re reading those words on the page. I try to hang onto how that felt, what my responses were, what images came up. I sit with that as long as I can. Because it’s those initial things that you’re going to carry through.”

Then there’s deciphering and downloading the director’s vision (which could be abstract or clear), and considering the viewpoints of the actors, who might have their own opinions on if they want to wear it - or if they don’t fit it - plus working within a budget, and making sure the visual language is consistent.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains, fabric ranges - even for basic silks and linens - have reduced; so too have available colours.

Hawley tries to support local craftspeople wherever possible. As one example, she worked with an English textile mill to weave some of the fabric used in Frankenstein.

But she’s also worried that technical knowledge of craft is dying off.

Hawley wonders whether, amid the AI boom and technological fatigue, there may be a counter-movement afoot to return to both nature - and to craft.

As with any artist, in costume work “you’re trying to find something”, Hawley says.

“Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t. I was trying to pursue that all the time [with Frankenstein] - grasp that thing. We found moments of it, but it’s an ongoing process.”

A costume designer also has to avoid being pigeon-holed into doing one particular type of project and often has to deal with misguided comments that anybody could do it - particularly with regard to modern costume work, which is stereotyped as simplistic, much like modern or abstract visual art.

Hawley is drawn to quirkier, darker stories, but reckons she’s softened as she’s got older. She likes the world building aspect of her design career.

For Frankenstein, Del Toro wanted the costumes to be very classical. But Hawley says she could do the film 100 times over, doing a different style every single time.

During her design process Hawley draws a lot, but she also has help from assistants. She listens a lot in fittings, and sometimes collages on Procreate.

The day we speak, Hawley walked the Giant’s Causeway, a nature preserve comprising about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns in Northern Ireland - the result of an ancient volcanic eruption - and came home with a colour palette from the various mosses and lichen she encountered.

People don’t always understand the amount of work involved in the finished product.

“Even in my world, people who don’t know or understand go, ‘Can’t you just make it?’ And I’m looking at the poor tailor standing there with bleeding thumbs who’s expected to turn around something in two days. It’d be like asking someone to grow a tree,” she says.

“It’s not just that it magically appears after cutting and stitching it together. There’s so many decisions that go into the making of a piece of costume. Fabric, colour palette, what’s the breakdown, what’s the proportion, does it fit? It’s all these decisions.”

Life after the Oscar

It’s a big lie that after you win an Oscar you’ll be offered every job, Hawley says when I ask if her phone has been ringing off the hook the last few months.

“I do get a lot of people going, ‘Have you paid this bill yet?’,” she laughs. “I’m working on all of that, by the way.”

However, Hawley has, she says, had more interesting conversations with amazing people - people whose work she respects and loves.

“I’m grateful for that. But look, I know my place. It’s all lovely and delicious, but at the end of the day, I’ve still got to just sit down and get my pencil out and draw.”

For the last five or so years Hawley has lived in Paparoa, a tiny settlement on a headwater of the Kaipara Harbour in Northland. About an hour and a half’s drive northwest of Auckland, it was inhabited by just over 400 people at the 2024 Census.

Wanting to dream more after the pandemic, she bought a little patch of land there, and now has sheep, cows and orchards.

She wakes up to mist that sits in the valley and is exquisitely beautiful, and her community steps in to look after her animals when she leaves for work overseas.

“I just didn’t feel like I was present any more, you know? Like I was just working and having coffees, and I wanted to get my hands dirty and grow trees and get back to nature a bit. And there’s so many artists up there.”

She says she couldn’t have done what she did without the support of her family - particularly her mother and sister, who both looked after Ruby a lot. “They were always worried, going, ‘It’s a bit erratic’. And it’s true.”

In tenacious Belfast, Hawley is loving working on Bad Bridgets alongside many Kiwi ex-pats who previously worked in the area, on the Game of Thrones TV series. The Bad Bridgets film follows two sisters fleeing famine-era Ireland to build a new life in 19th century New York. Once there, they join a community of Irish women who cause chaos across the city.

Hawley’s daughter Ruby, who’s a photographer, is over there with her.

In her Oscar acceptance speech, she described Ruby as the Little Edie to her Big Edie.

“It’s like kids born into a farming family, and they’ll be learning that trade. Everyone is aware of their world, and it’s hard to avoid it. My poor daughter, born into the world of the costume department. You’re a travelling nomad instantly, aren’t you? Girl in the trunk,” Hawley laughs.

What about a word for young people who want to work in costume or set design?

Well, for one, she says there are no straight rules or path - everyone who Hawley’s met in the industry has got to where they are in a different way.

“I did a bit of really bad design work myself. … But I also did jobs where I could learn and see what other designers were doing, so I could start seeing how the bigger machine worked.

“My advice would be to get with like-minded creatives and your own contemporaries. Develop and share ideas, support each other in each other’s projects and work, and keep growing.

“You can’t sit there and wait for someone to drop the big film in your lap. That didn’t happen to me until I was 40. To develop your own language you have to start working. You have to start doing stuff. And make mistakes. I still believe in making mistakes. It might not come out right, but you’ve got to keep trying. I’d like our audience out there to be a bit more supportive of that.”