Nancy Goodman Iland’s home kitchen is a two-car garage filled with multiple convection ovens and several cooktops. Every day, Nancy loads her ovens in her car. Some days, she’ll bring 32 ready-to-eat, identical chicken breasts; on others, she’ll carefully transport a 19th-century traditional wedding cake.
Nancy is a food stylist in Hollywood. She makes scenes look “more authentic,” she says, from throwing hot dogs on a cheap plate for a greasy spoon diner shot to serving a perfectly braised coq au vin to an extra in a high-end French restaurant. She has been responsible for envisioning and cooking all the food on script for some of the most memorable recent Hollywood productions, from Brooklyn 99 to A Star is Born. But after talking to her for a couple of minutes, it is obvious the job is not merely about cooking. A food stylist is not just a chef. Not without being a researcher, a time-traveller and a food maestro.
Nancy got her first job in a fast-food restaurant in Los Angeles, where she was born and raised. A few months later, she started working for a catering company. One day, she got a phone call from one of her caterer friends, who was into food styling. “Can you be at Universal in 20 minutes?,” Nancy recalls. “I showed up. The person I had to replace never came back, and I took over her job as a food stylist!”
As a veteran food stylist – and one of the firsts in the industry who wasn’t “the prop master’s wife,” she says – Nancy can cook anything. And when she can’t, she goes to the library downtown. For example, in an episode of Murder, She Wrote, a flashback scene to an 1852 wedding required a historically accurate wedding cake. She went to the library, and found information about food she could serve to people in the background – hardtack and jerky – but nothing on wedding cakes. “I went to the librarian, chatted with her, and she came out with a random girl’s diary from 1852, where she described every detail of her own wedding, including the cake,” she says. “So I cooked this three-tiered white cake with frosting, colonial banners, swags, and a goblet on top, which meant abundance and wealth.”
Unless the food details are part of the script – which is not often the case – Nancy comes up with her own version of “alien food” or “fancy dinner”. Anything goes. Provided, of course, that actors can eat it – and are willing to. “With more people being vegetarians or on gluten-free diets, I’m always checking food requirements,” says Nancy. While working on Brooklyn 99, there was a scene where Chelsea Peretti eats a sandwich stuffed with chilli, pizza and mac and cheese. “She was on a vegetarian, gluten-free, sugar-free diet, so I had to make the fattest sandwich I could, with the strictest restrictions,” says Nancy. “I cooked everything without gluten, dairy, eggs and meat, and it still looked savoury.”
Pregnancies, allergies, taste preferences – Nancy will “do everything to accommodate everyone”. But sometimes, there is no way around a juicy, tender –real– steak, so Nancy shares Angela Lansbury’s technique with actors on strict diets: “You start with the fork in your mouth. When you hear ‘Action!’, slowly take the fork out as if you just took a bite. If necessary, you move your food around a bit.” And just like that, the deed is done – no food involved.
“The main actor gets a new scoop for every take, but we give background actors powdered mashed potatoes because it has the same crystal-y look as ice cream, but doesn’t melt”
Nancy Goodman Iland
Sometimes, food styling is about working around food rather than with it. “We tend to use real food unless it’s ice cream,” says Nancy. “The main actor gets a new scoop for every take, but we give background actors powdered mashed potatoes because it has the same crystal-y look as ice cream, but doesn’t melt.”
The same goes for the quantity of food: while the main actor usually gets a new plate for every take, everyone else doesn’t. “If everyone is supposed to be eating steak, they all get a nicely stylised plate. But they don’t touch it,” says Nancy. That is not only to avoid consuming much more food but also to avoid continuity errors: “As they keep doing take after take, I put a few more pieces of meat in their plate that they can nibble on, but the rest of the plate doesn’t move, for continuity.”
For a dinner scene in Gangster Squad with Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, Nancy cooked 32 chicken breasts with a lemon and raspberry sauce for Sean Penn’s shots. “He kept eating, and 16 takes later, I was thinking, ‘how is he eating all that food?’ until he said, ‘this sauce is amazing – I can’t stop eating it!’,” Nancy recalls. “I made him a special jar of sauce that he took home.”
Nancy’s dedication to creating dishes that captivate both the eyes and the palate has made her popular in Hollywood. From Bradley Cooper’s “hugs and kisses” for the cake she created on A Star is Born to Dr. Dre demanding her barbecue chicken on the set of Straight Outta Compton, her reputation is one of a devoted chef. And that is also because Nancy’s commitment to her job goes beyond inventing the food and cooking it: “When actors are cooking on camera, I give them tips so they look like they know what they’re doing,” she says. Once, she took all the Kitchen Confidential cast, who were cooks on the show, to an open-kitchen restaurant, so they could see how chefs work together. “Being a food stylist is a demanding job on all levels. But when you love it, you don’t even notice.”
You can find Nancy’s food reel and entire filmography on her website.