How a Gizmo Used to Photograph Taco Ads Took Over the Red Carpet

On a drizzly recent Sunday night, the Art Deco lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza was clogged with celebrities attending “Saturday Night Live” ’s fiftieth-anniversary show. Taran Killam, who played Donald Trump on the show in 2015, strolled in wearing a double-breasted tux and stopped cold when he noticed a curly-haired man in a green suit standing beside a rig that looked like a ten-foot-tall Swiss Army knife.

“Oh, here it is,” Killam said. The man was Cole Walliser, a forty-three-year-old director, and the gizmo was the Glambot, a high-speed camera mounted on a giant robotic arm. Walliser oversees the device during the E! network’s red-carpet coverage, and the resulting dramatic slo-mo celebrity action clips are posted to TikTok and Instagram. (“S.N.L.” was a warmup for the Oscars, two weeks later.)

Killam paused before strutting up to the Glambot, planning his shot. “Just imagine it’s raining and I’m not wearing a shirt,” he told Walliser. When Walliser called “Action!” Killam unleashed a roundhouse kick for his portrait.

Walliser has become a fixture at awards-show red carpets in the past decade, ever since E! replaced the Mani Cam (Julianne Moore and Jennifer Aniston led a revolt that shut it down) with the Glambot. “When we first started doing this, I had to tell people not to leave their mark, because there’s this huge arm that might be flying at them,” he said. The camera arm swings around, toward, and away from its subjects, like a big metal snake. “Someone covered their face like it was going to attack them one time,” Walliser said. “But it made for a good shot.”

The souped-up camera has humble roots. “It was mostly used for food commercials,” Walliser said, while he waited for the “S.N.L.” crowd. “So maybe there was a Taco Bell commercial where you see the taco break in half slowly and the camera’s whipping around, and somebody had the idea ‘Hey, what would happen if we shot people with it?’ ”

Walliser grew up in Vancouver, filming his friends skateboarding, before moving to Los Angeles, where he directed commercials and music videos. He started working with E! as the official Glambot host in 2016; he has a laid-back charm that’s handy when he’s dealing with people who attempt, and sometimes fail, to pull off audacious pirouettes, often in heels. A few subjects have stumbled while doing a pose.

Celebrities are usually happy to see Walliser on the red carpet, he said, in part because “they’re answering the same question fifty times.” He added, “I have to figure out the difference between what we talk about them doing and what their body language is telling me. If someone is clearly anxious, I’m, like, ‘Let’s not try a spin—let’s just do something chill.’ ”

At 30 Rock, a line had formed for the Glambot, with wranglers handing off clients to Walliser as their stylists made tweaks to outfits and makeup.

Maya Rudolph cheered on Bowen Yang while he struck a pose in a sharp red suit and adjusted his glasses like a Bond villain. When it was Rudolph’s turn, she tried out some angles and hand motions.

“Can you give me a push-in on that side?” Walliser asked his camera operator. Then: “Three, two, one, action!”

Rudolph daintily fluttered a rosette petal on the shoulder of her blue satin gown while the robot arm sprang toward her like a cobra.

“This is terrifying,” she said, laughing. “It’s like being at a dentist.”