Justin Herbert is known as one of the smartest players in the NFL. The quarterback went to Oregon intending to study medicine, and in the full story for Sports Illustrated Kids he casually compares the NFL defenses he and Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh dismantle to the proteins he studied in biology. His head is always in the game, and for the Sept./Oct. SI Kids cover, it’s also sitting casually at his hip.
But the question that haunted this concept from the start, and the tale of how it came together, started with a very important question: Is a decapitated Herbert too frightening for kids?
“It’s not too scary,” says SI Kids art director Drew Dzwonkowski, who pitched the idea as the perfect way to present an issue that needed to both focus on football and have the right tone for fall. “A freaky football preview,” he says. “The September/October issue is the perfect chance to mash up football with Halloween.”
For this issue, Dzwonkowski wanted to lean hard into a spooky idea, recalling the Tim Jacobus Goosebumps book covers he loved as a kid. Recently seeing Death Becomes Her on Broadway cemented the idea of doing a wacky horror gag. On stage, an actor’s head is detached, and a double plays the rest of her body. Dzwonkowski says, “We wanted to do the kind of thing that’s scary on paper, but just campy enough it becomes fun.”
The idea was sent to the Chargers by photo editor Marguerite Schropp Lucarelli. She explained that kids submit drawings of Herbert to the magazine’s art gallery and the staff wanted to use him in a unique way. She told the Chargers about “a crazy-fun idea the kids were going to love.” A cover that really sold the theme of a freaky fall football issue.
"We would love to photograph a portrait of Justin in full uniform and in post production, remove his head and tuck it under his arm,” wrote Scropp Lucarelli.
The quarterback agreed to go headless. With Herbert onboard, it was back to blood and guts and run of the mill editorial issues, like decapitating your cover star. The photo shoot and interview—in which Herbert also talked about his new farm animals—took place at the same time, in the early morning before a Chargers practice.
Getting a crazed, half-sane, but still smart-looking expression was the key to nailing the right look for a face that doesn’t belong on a body. Behind the scenes Herbert tried several iterations to get it just right.
The lighting for his face and body would need to be perfect in order for Herbert’s head to look like it belonged by his side when the images were moved in post production. Shot with a Nikon Z8 connected to a monitor, photographer Kohjiro Kinno says the shoot was complicated because of a tight timeframe and tricky lighting. “We had five strobe lights on Herbert and any slight movement or change to the angles drastically affected the shot. We also had filters on the strobes to give it a little color so we had to try a few variations until things looked right.”
It cannot be overemphasized: Not many NFL quarterbacks would be so willing. “Herbert stuck around so we could get more,” says Kinno. “He was awesome to work with. He did everything we asked.”
With all the visual elements in place, the effort of presenting Herbert as a headless quarterback was nearly complete. The photos just needed to go to post-production.
Director of premedia Dan Larkin loved the idea when he heard about it. “I was just surprised Herbert went for it,” he says. Larkin was out of office when the images came in so he built the cover based on a mock up sent by Dzwonkowski. “It had Herbert holding his head in his arms, but I leaned into the idea of it being a Halloween issue—a football version of the Headless Horseman.”
Dzwonkowski says the original idea was a bit too sinister. “Instead of seeing the neckhole where his head would be, I mocked it up with the top half of Herbert’s body fading into darkness behind our logo. But it looked like a random guy was walking around with Herbert’s head. The way Dan did it was way more fun, and ironically less scary. Any time you can pull off a cover that makes people stop scrolling for more than a half-second you’re onto something.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Justin Herbert Has a Good Head on His Shoulders…Usually.