Emmy-nominated costume designer Dana Covarrubias and cast member Lilian Rebelo decode the outfits and share what it’s like to act in the hit Hulu show
For Fordham grads Dana Covarrubias and Lilian Rebelo, working on the stylish murder mystery comedy Only Murders in the Building—alongside stars Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short—has been a killer experience. The show, which gives its three podcaster lead characters a new murder to solve each season, has earned critical praise and devoted fans both for its striking design and comedic performances.
Costuming the ‘Best-Dressed Show on TV’
Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, Covarrubias was “obsessed with clothes and fabric.”
“Most parents take their kids to a playground to play, and my parents took me to the mall,” she half-jokes. “I would hide in the clothing racks and just rub all the fabrics on my face.”
Covarrubias also became obsessed with theater as a sixth grader, and once she arrived at Fordham, the interdisciplinary nature of Fordham Theatre allowed her to work both behind the scenes and onstage. During her junior year, a friend who was directing a show asked her to do costume designs, and she says she “started falling in love with it more and more.”
After graduating in 2007, Covarrubias got an internship in the costume department of the sketch comedy show The Whitest Kids U’ Know. “My very first day on that job, I walked in and I saw a bunch of costume crew members building a giant bear costume, and they were just covered in brown fur and had glue guns and they seemed like they were having the best time,” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘Oh, you can get paid to do this.’”
Covarrubias spent the next decade-plus designing for critically acclaimed shows like Master of None, Claws, and Ramy. It was in 2020 that her agent told her about an opportunity: a new series starring Gomez, Martin, and Short that would follow their characters as they try to solve a series of murders via their true crime podcast.
“Once I found out who the cast was, I was trying not to freak out,” she says. “But then once I got the call that I was hired, the line producer of season one was like, ‘Oh my God, can you believe we get to work with Steve Martin and Martin Short? This is insane.’ And that was the first time I let myself be like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’” As the lead costume designer of the show, Covarrubias has been nominated for three Emmys, and the characters’ outfits have attracted a fanbase all their own. Gomez’s in particular have inspired fawning coverage from Vogue, Elle, and W—all of which touched on viewers’ longing for her looks—and Defector called the series the “best-dressed show on TV.”
Design Guided by the Search for Connection
Covarrubias’ approach to designing the series is guided by the idea that it’s a show about people trying to find connection, she says, and the original script gave some character traits that influenced costume choices off the bat.
Martin’s character Charles, for instance, makes the same omelet every day, so Covarrubias knew he would find comfort in sameness and would have a limited color palette. Short’s Putnam, on the other hand, is a theater director and a narcissist, and Covarrubias knew his costumes would have to be showier and more colorful.
For Covarrubias, the job as lead costume designer—while it includes everything from creating a season’s mood boards to shopping to being on set to monitor every new costume as it’s introduced—often starts with creating relationships, “knowing how to interact with the producers and the directors and having those creative conversations, and then [building] your relationship with the actors.”
“As a costume designer, you’re often the first person that an actor is meeting when they come to the job,” she says. “You have that responsibility and you represent the show in a lot of ways.”
An Actress’s ‘Dream Project’
In the show’s fourth season, one of those actors was Rebelo, a 2021 Fordham Theatre graduate who played Ana, the daughter in a family that occupies an apartment in the somewhat mysterious western wing of the titular building.
She was drawn to Fordham, like Covarrubias, because of the holistic style of learning she could bring to her acting training.
“I really love learning and I love school, so going somewhere that would allow me to keep learning other things alongside my acting was really important to me,” says Rebelo, who also majored in Latin American and Latino studies. “I find it makes you a better actor, makes you a better person, to be able to know a little bit of everything.”
After graduating during a mid-pandemic lull in acting jobs, Rebelo stayed sharp by doing as many readings, workshops, and auditions as she could while working survival gigs. The New Jersey native had gotten an agent from her senior showcase at Fordham, and in the summer of 2023, landed what she says was her biggest job to date at the time, a role in the West Coast premiere of My Dear Dead Drug Lord—a play from which she had performed a scene as part of her senior showcase.
Back in New York in early 2024, Rebelo got an email from her agency telling her there was an audition for season 4 of Only Murders. After a first reading over Zoom and a subsequent callback, Rebelo got word she landed the part. Filming began less than a month later, beginning what Rebelo calls a “dream project … start to finish.”
“I was acting around legends, literal legends,” she says. “Daphne Rubin-Vega is playing my mother, and I am just hanging out with her in the green room and talking to her. And then every time we were filming, I was sitting across the table from Martin Short and Selena Gomez and Steve Martin. I was just trying to soak it all up.”
Rebelo, who just wrapped up a role in The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics at INTAR Theatre in Manhattan—where she interned as a Fordham student—says that one of the most memorable experiences of her time on Only Murders came at the very beginning of filming: her first costume fitting with Covarrubias and her team.
“They kept putting me in all these outfits and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is awesome,’” she says. “I felt like the coolest person on earth.”
