The series stars a roster of young British talent; including Maisie Williams, Louis Partridge, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Iris Law (who makes her acting debut). But their celebrity glow was more a hindrance than a help to Primorac. "We literally had to unpolish them," she said. "There were a lot of fake teeth, the hair was greasy, the skin was greasy and full of spots -- we had to make prosthetic spots."

Primorac asked Julien Temple, the filmmaker who kickstarted his career with a documentary chronicling the rise of the Sex Pistols in the mid-1970s, why the punk precedent was generally looking less hygenic. "He said it was the fact that people didn't have access to what we have today. We don't really think of that anymore ... (back then) people had soap and water and that was it. If you went out to a bar and you didn't come home for two days, you didn't really stop and have a shower somewhere," she recalled. "And also people's bad diets, lots of drinking and drugs and all sorts of things."

In addition to replicating the iconic hairstyles and face paint, Primorac also had to capture the movement's heavy-going lifestyle and its effects on the body. "And at the end of the day, (the cast) would take that punk look off and clean with very expensive, lovely cosmetics and go home and look like normal 21st-century actors."