From Nicole Kidman’s wigs to Chris Pine’s majestic mane, stunning strands to floppy mops, film lovers are obsessed with movie hair. A perfunctory web search turns up an endless succession of lists judging the follicles of film: the best and worst movie bangs; the best hair in the Star Wars universe; every Tom Cruise movie ranked by the magnificence of his hair and, separately, in every Mission: Impossible movie; Brad Pitt’s twelve best movie haircuts; ten Sebastian Stan haircuts ranked; every Zeus in film and television, ranked by facial hair.

Letterboxd is unashamed, too. Members have ranked the under-cuts and comb-overs of Kurt Russell, Ryan Gosling, Oscar Isaac (quite specifically), Andrew Garfield, Jake Gyllenhaal, the Roberts Sheehan and Pattinson, Hugh Grant, Colin Farrell, Alex Lawther, Daniel Day-Lewis, Keanu, Timothée and many others. It seems there is a ranking of hair practically every other week on the web—on Vulture and The Cut most especially. The New York magazine off-shoots dubbed 2021 Hollywood’s Year of the Wig and they’re particularly obsessed with Nicole Kidman’s rugs. (Truly.) (Still don’t believe me?) (You’re on your own then.)

In fact, I’m squinting to find another actress whose hair-work gets as much attention as Kidman’s—ah, Julia Roberts, of course. The great Meryl Streep. And Cate Blanchett—who sometimes has folk crying in the corner when she is a redhead. One actress who seems to get really lucky with wigs, according to both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Letterboxd reviews, is Allison Janney.

This fascination with movie hair is a curious one but, as an audience, it seems to be our thing. Hair is a deeply personal and very relatable visual cue and hair opinions are, in a word, strong. It feels important for us to have a take on actors’ hair, to rank Nicolas Cage’s performances by the quality of the wig. Most of all, we seem to take it really personally when we think it’s hair-gone-wrong.

The 24-hour online news cycle has given us all much more insight into the lives of stars; most of us can pull up a mental image of what an actor looks like in real life, making the ‘fourth wall’ quite see-through. Trickery is harder these days; the belief in “movie magic” a little jaded. It’s as if all of cinema is infused with a silent, persistent longing from viewers, striving to understand: ‘Why that hair?’

Pity the craftspeople behind the scenes, for hair decisions—especially wigs—are much more in focus in the 21st century. Literally. Film was kind to wigs, high definition and modern televisions not so much.

The subtle cues of wigs are harder to spot on film. I’ve scoured through many hours of pre-digital footage looking at hairlines and parts and they are just much softer in light captured on celluloid. In HD, everything is more noticeable. Extreme focus can make two of the telltale signs of wigs—a harsh hairline and an unnatural part—much more obvious, even though the audience might not realise what it is they are seeing. And while even natural light can distort hair color, the powerful and flexible LEDs of today also diminish tones and many just aren’t built for subtlety and beauty.

So the work of a hair stylist is more important than ever—but the conditions under which they work have long been less than ideal.

It starts with a character on a page and it ends in the hair-and-makeup trailer, often before 5:00am, with a strict time limit. In between this process a lot of people have a say in what happens. In an ideal world the actor, director and hair guru all have a similar goal for what the final look will be, what the character needs to convey and how that’s translated to the audience via a hairstyle. Collaboration is the name of the game. Over a long story arc this journey needs to be mapped out in pre-production and appropriate budget allocated.

This is all set against an industry background of sexism and many other inequalities in ‘the vanities’—a colloquial and controversial name given to hair, makeup and wardrobe technicians. These days, those departments are largely female-occupied, but for many decades makeup was the men’s domain, while women ran the hair trailers. That in part accounts for a long-delayed Oscar recognition (the first award for makeup was in 1968, but it didn’t become an annual category until 1981), and for the still-uneven contract rates in some regions for makeup versus hair, in spite of both crafts belonging to the same union.

Badie’s artistry on Sony’s forthcoming Whitney Houson biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody has already been tipped for awards notice, alongside the work of Jaime Leigh McIntosh, the lead hair designer on Netflix’s Blonde (and whose uncanny talent I was lucky to work alongside in her early years in the industry). Badie and Jaime Leigh (who goes by her first names professionally), along with Janney and her wigmaker Rob Pickens, are just the experts I need to help me give you a closer look at the roots of movie hair.

There are many steps in the life cycle of hair on film:
how hair decisions get made, the process of wig-making and all the complex avenues that lead to how things end up on screen, where we then casually rank the work from our cozy armchairs. The most important of which is: movie stars are just like us.

It’s true, just like mortals, celebrities can have good and bad hair days. Some are blessed with a great head of hair—abundant, luscious and healthy. Some are not—thin, receding, damaged, limp. For better or worse, hair is related to health, vitality, masculinity (note the bias at the top of this article towards ranking male actors’ hair) and most importantly in Hollywood, youth.

Hair says a lot about you, and hair is very personal, even sacred. Actors often choose not to share their hair with us. They, very reasonably, want a costume for their head as well as their body.

We relate to hair on screen because we all have our own hair struggles. We have our own good and bad hair days. We have hair envy and hair goals. We marvel at hair perfection in the media, strive to achieve it for ourselves and call it out harshly when we see something we don’t like. Ask anyone what they check first in the mirror and it’s generally their hair. Most of our hair envy comes from Instagram, from the very same movie stars who get so heavily critiqued for their characters’ hair.

Yes, hair is a character. A very relatable one, as witnessed by nearly every movie review ever of American Hustle. (Naturally, there is a definitive ranking of that movie’s hair—by The Atlantic no less. Bradley Cooper’s tight curls come out on top.) With her tongue in her cheek, Vulture writer Roxana Hadadi eloquently storylines Robert Eggers’ The Northman via star Alexander Skarsgård’s various hairdos (under hair-and-makeup supervisor Stefania Pellegrini), articulating how character evolution often relies heavily on hairstyles.

Hair is not a fixed state on any given day, week or month. It’s a living costume, it grows. It reacts to health, sleep, the environment, the weather. Worst of all, for anyone who’s been on set all day with the sole task of looking after hair, it moves around.

Just ask Badie, whose credits include the HBO series Lovecraft Country. He came to the show after the pilot had been made, when the series had already committed to using the natural hair of its star, Jurnee Smollett, while filming in the wilting Atlanta summers. Though he has collaborated with Smollett often—going all the way back to Kasi Lemmons’ 1997 feature debut Eve’s Bayou—the filming environment presented challenges for her Lovecraft Country character, Letitia, as Badie told Filmmaker magazine:

“I really would have petitioned to get a wig, just so it could have made shooting easier for us. We got through it, but it was definitely minute to minute, not day by day, that her hair could change. We’re already running late, so if I want her to step over here for ten minutes so that I can re-curl the whole front of her hair in the middle of the woods in a tent that needs electricity… Everything that I can think of as a challenge, we went through.”

And this is where wigs come in. There are many reasons a hair designer might favor a wig over an actor’s own head of hair, says LA-based hair artist Jaime Leigh, who came up through the New Zealand screen industry and has had a busy few years on Blonde, Don’t Worry Darling, Babylon and Oppenheimer. “If the style requires the talent to change their own hair length, color or texture and they are not willing to,” she explains, “[or] if the character being portrayed has multiple style, length, color changes throughout the arc of their story; if the styling is so involved that it would make more sense for it to happen on the wig without the actor needing to be there.”

Period pieces and biopics often require such a complete transformation that wigs make the most sense. Modern cutting techniques and the advanced hair-coloring systems of today have no place in the 1700s or even the 1940s. Then there are the many character transformations that are best served by Ctrl+Alt+Delete of the actor’s own hair. No, that is not Joaquin Phoenix’s real hair he’s dyeing broccoli-green in Joker.

“It’s really all pros when using wigs,” Badie tells me. “They allow you the utmost in creativity, flexibility and versatility. There aren’t many limits when using wigs.” A wig, he asserts, gives you total creative autonomy.

The fact that a wig application can be quicker and more manageable than extensive daily hairstyling is a big pointer to why someone like Academy Award-winning actress Kidman wears wigs most of the time, even when shooting contemporary roles. The sleek, full-volume looks that she has sported on the red carpet are too time-consuming for daily on-set prep, not to mention taxing on the hair.

If there was an award for most critiqued on-screen wigs across the internet, hers surely would win, year on year, and I don’t know that we’ll ever get to the bottom of why, but I have theories that involve her marital history, the abundant diversity of her roles and her commitment to her craft, all of which makes her off-screen personality somewhat of a mystery and therefore more of a magnet for attention in our information-obsessed, very online culture.

Occasionally the price of a big-ticket wig gets dropped into news headlines like a constitutional catastrophe. ‘How can this be?’ the audience gasps. ‘How can my monthly salary be the same as a wig?!’ Well, that money is the difference between Nancy in Stranger Things and you at Hallowe’en, or Streep in more movies than I care to mention. Wig-making is a highly specialized skill that I hope never dies, and the results speak for themselves. Janney’s Crosby-designed look on Lou, for example, was brought to life by one of the best. “Rob Pickens made that wig, and I love it,” she enthuses.

“Allison is one of my favorite collaborators,” Pickens notes. “She loves a wig!” An industry legend, his work has been seen on heads from Tom Hanks to Tom Hardy. Other credits from his company, Wigmaker Associates, include Will Ferrell’s comical yet marvelous transformation in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford in The First Lady, J. Smith Cameron as Gerri Killman in Succession and many more notable television shows from True Detective to The Gilded Age. Even Billie Eilish has sported one of Pickens’ wigs.

If Pickens is making the custom wig process for a lead actor sound like a simple matter of material selection, it is far more mysterious and detailed than that, so I ask him to elaborate. “The custom-wig process begins with taking measurements and a hairline tracing from the actor (using cellophane and tape),” he explains. “We then pad out a custom block to precisely match the actor’s measurements. After building the foundation by hand (using bobbinet lace), we begin to knot the entire wig one to two hairs at a time.”

Again, Pickens is making the process sound easy. Often the actor is not in the same city as the wigmaker, or does not have time in their schedule for the wigmaker to take their measurements, which means someone else does it, off-site. I’m longing for someone to invent a better process for this (VFX 3D scanners, I’m looking at you) but for the most part it’s still done with plastic wrap, extra-wide tape and a sharpie.

Once the actor’s head has been precisely recreated as a head block, the wigmaker can then custom-make a wig foundation. This is hand sewn with a fine tulle-like fabric—the aforementioned bobbinet, or wig lace—almost always from Europe. Stretch is needed in some areas and strength in others depending on the final hair style and head shape. Stronger and more robust wig lace can be used for the crown and back of the wig and very fine, extremely delicate lace is used for the front areas that are more likely to be seen on camera, especially the front hairline where it is glued to the head and needs to be close to invisible.

Then human hair must be sourced and prepped. The hair market is vast. Darker, coarser hair from Asia is abundant and can be colored to any shade. Finer textured, European, virgin hair—hair that hasn’t been chemically treated—is less abundant and therefore more expensive (“only comparable to gold” in Rob’s words) but provides more versatility for styling. The texture and shades of the natural hair are critical for the final look.

“At my studio,” says Rob, “we source directly from the country of origin. This allows us to control the quality of our hair from start to finish. All of the bundles arrive virgin undrawn, and are sorted to lengths in-shop. Any dipping or coloring that needs to happen is also done in-house to maintain the quality and luster.”

After this prep is done, the wigmaker can then go about attaching the hair to the wig foundation. These wigs are often referred to as hand tied (as opposed to machine made). Each hair—yes you read that correctly—each single strand of hair is individually looped through a hole in the lace and tied into a knot with a tiny needle, similar to a crochet needle. The direction of the knot determines the direction of how the hair will sit on the head and how naturally it will move. The directional growth pattern of hair is usually mapped out in advance and drawn onto the wig map.

In these final stages, if the wig can be checked on the actor and tiny adjustments made, it comes close to a perfect union. “The entire process, start to finish, takes about 100 to 150 hours per wig,” Pickens reveals. Sounding a bit more like this could be worth a month’s wages?

Sometimes that check is picked up by a star herself. In 2013, I worked on Low Down, a low-budget film with an A-list cast directed by Jeff Preiss. Glenn Close plays a gritty matriarch, one of her many roles that required her to leave behind any essence of traditional beauty or obvious grooming. Because of her professionalism and understanding of how budgets work, Close arrived for her first day of fittings and tests with her own wig. She knew if the options were left up to anyone else on such a low budget there was a high chance of a bad wig and this was just not acceptable for someone of her professionalism and stature. The wig she brought in was custom-made for her (possibly from a previous project), fit like a glove and looked wonderful on screen.

I ask Jaime Leigh and Badie what they wished producers knew about wigs. “The time needed in preparing and styling to get the wigs to look their best and to maintain them,” pleads Jaime Leigh. “They deserve respect. It is a difficult task trying to mimic nature and that’s what we as the hairstylist and wigmaker are attempting to do, mimic a natural head of hair.”

Badie is slightly more frank: “That you get what you pay for. The better the quality of the wigs, the better they will look—and the more expensive they may be.”

Movie wig-making is a process as intricate as tailoring and costume designing for the body, yet it still seems a mystery to most outside the hair and makeup trailers—which is where the wig travels next.

Once the wig has reached completion and been approved, it’s out of the wigmaker’s hands and onto the set, delivered to hairstylists for daily styling and application, and to maintain its integrity for the duration of the shoot. It must be hugely anxiety inducing to send your (very expensive) hair-baby out the door into the hands of someone else, knowing it has a complicated journey ahead. I have personally witnessed hand-made wigs being destroyed by less-than-capable technicians. As Pickens tells me, “I work with designers I trust to respect and handle the wig properly. When mutual trust and respect is at the forefront in the process, handing over our handmade art is easy.”

And that’s the next part of the art: application.

It should be appalling, on a film that is literally named for an iconic head of hair, that the hair itself was not the on-set priority. For the passionate and dedicated technicians working behind the scenes this is anxiety inducing, but at the same time I didn’t really blink at the news. There are countless obstacles that—you guessed it—make you want to pull your hair out. At times it takes a lot of guts to stand up to the hierarchy on set and demand the time and respect that you need to give to the actors.

Indeed, what made the difference for Badie on the set of Lovecraft Country, when Smollet’s “hair personality” would change constantly, was the hair designer’s advocacy for his department. As he told Filmmaker magazine, “I’ll go to the [assistant director] and say ‘This is important for hair, I need my time.’ I don’t think it’s fair if someone stands over me saying, ‘We’re ready! We’re ready!’ Instead of there being a mystery about it, I find if you talk to people and tell them you’re going to need this time after every take or third take because it’s important for the whole look, then they’ll be very supportive.”

After our work is done in the hair-and-makeup trailer it can sometimes be hours before actors are on set and in front of the camera. During this time any number of things can happen: sleeping, rehearsing, costume fittings, lunch, exercise, chatting in the rain, close-hugging every person they see… the list goes on.

There is allocated time for us to make adjustments and fix issues between the last rehearsal, the final camera and lighting adjustments and when action is called. It’s brief—minutes in the single digits—and everyone is waiting for you to finish your work and step aside. This time is shared between hair, makeup, props and costume. If you can get your hair touch-ups done without spraying another crew member in the face with hairspray it’s a miracle. Some actors are patient and respectful of our work, some less so. Some don’t like to be fussed with, some require endless attention. It’s a dance.

I’d love to say it’s all 21st-century unicorns and rainbows behind the scenes and on set but a lot of pressure is put on ‘the vanities’ (that word again) to work invisibly and at the speed it takes to remove an apple box from shot. It’s frequently a delicate balance between getting what you want to get done while also allowing the actors the space to do their work.

More and more, I’m hearing stories of directors ‘saving space’ for cast once the camera turns over—often because they haven’t had time to run a scene—and completely locking out crew who would traditionally go in for last looks or on-set adjustments. Other times, your actors and their hair are flown (literally) to a mountain or out to sea and your work is in the hands of fate. Obviously, location elements can really work against hair. Badie tells me, “an on-set horror hair moment for me would be if the hair look is to be glamorous but it’s an exterior scene and it’s raining outside. These are never fun days.”

Just know that any time you see hair looking good outdoors—where it’s potentially been windy, damp, humid, sweaty—it’s taken a lot of work, constant attention and speaking up.

Often, you just pray that the edit is good.

Pre-production can be minimal on pick-ups and even if there was time to get the best wigs made there very rarely is the money available. It’s a scramble to make it work, and it’s potentially a whole different crew. I’ve seen countless scenes in movies where the actor’s hair literally changes length from one shot to the next. I suspect that the decision to let this ride was preferable to using a bad wig—especially obvious with short male hair, but also on women (here’s Vulture’s ode to Kate Mara’s Fantastic Four “reshoots wig”). I also suspect that these decisions are ultimately out of the hands of the hair team. Above-the-line crew (read: producers and directors) often win in the roulette of schedule-budget-deadline.

My hope is that this insider knowledge lends some robust insight to your next hair ranking. One thing it doesn’t answer, though, is why ranked lists and hair-thirst thinkpieces overwhelmingly favor men.

Fun fact: I would say, overall, that male actors fuss more with their hair than others do. Why? I’m still pondering this, and I’ve been a keen observer of (and participant in) what goes on behind the scenes for the last three decades. There’s a lot of psychology in hair, much more than in makeup in my opinion. It’s often a surprise that men succumb to a particular kind of hair obsession.

I was first exposed to this on the very first feature I worked on back in the late ’90s. I was looking after an unnamed actor and on my first day on set with him we did a take of an action piece in a dark alley. On cut, his first words were: “how was my hair in that shot?” This statement was directed at me, obviously, and it was one of my many early and memorable lessons—the vanity is real, and pay attention to the psyche.

I don’t know why I was surprised and amused by this vanity. Perhaps it’s understandable when your day job requires being photographed. And as with all things, gender-directed social pressure comes into the picture. From Samson and Delilah to the present day, our society still holds an unbalanced regard for the perceived virility of a man with a full head of hair. Just look at the number of hair serums and treatments, the number of Letterboxd lists and Twitter threads that focus on the ursine qualities of men on screen. The screams when it seemed that Jason Momoa was shaving his entire head; the sighs when it turned out to be a one-sided fade for a tattoo reveal. (The late Robert Forster famously had jibes about his thinning hair written into the script for Alligator.)

In a separate interview, proud baldy Ed Harris recently told us: “If I had a full head of hair, and had a full head of hair my entire life, I’d probably be a completely different person, to tell you the truth. My career probably would have benefited.” Ed is innocent, but there is a breed of actor out there who just won’t settle when it comes to how their hair is styled. Persnickety is a word that comes to mind. I frequently hand over the grooming products to men and let them style their hair as they see fit because to do anything else is not worth the energy.

On a recent project with a young actor, the entire staff of the hair-and-makeup team had to reconsider their standards for hair continuity because he would not stop touching his hair, ever. Every reflective surface became an opportunity for hair re-assessment, like a young Narcissus in the making, none of us wishing to be his Nemesis. So please consider, if you see terrible or weird hair on an actor, this could be why. An actor’s concern with how their hair looks overtakes any trust in the professionals around them.

The bottom line is that whenever you watch an entire film or television series and don’t spot one wig or a hair out of place, know that magic has happened. Anyone putting creative work out into the world will have many masters. For the hair artisans in film it’s their own integrity, the actors they are working on, the director’s vision, the producer and their budgets and occasionally you, the audience.

If this story is only the beginning of your own growing obsession with the whys and how-tos of wig-work and Hollywood hair, your timing is perfect: awards season is upon us. It’s the one time of year when our industry’s media really pays attention to the artists behind the work, and you will notice an increase in “for your consideration” interviews and Instagram stories and Vulture deep-dives about process and vision. Jaime Leigh interviews many hair designers on her own show, The Last Looks Podcast, which goes deep into detail on the craft.

Oddly, for a creative craft that attracts such obsession, hair doesn’t have its own awards-season category. At the Oscars, for example, the trophy is given for Outstanding Hair and Makeup but it’s far more often been the makeup artists up on the stage. And that’s not even getting into whose names get to go on the Oscar-nomination ballot, which, like several other craft categories including visual effects, is a complex negotiation of unions, roles, relationships and other Hollyweird carry-on that rarely reflects reality.

Fortunately the union holds its own hair-and-makeup awards—but wigmakers are yet to have their day on the podium. What does a fine weave have to do to get a trophy around here? “I quite enjoy my place in the industry,” says Pickens, our humble wig-making legend. “That said, without the wigmaker, there is often not a head of hair to dress. Being recognized and credited as an integral part of the hair team would be appreciated by all wigmakers.”

My hope is that audiences take Pickens’ words to heart when making future hair rankings so that soon, when I search “best wig” on Letterboxd, I’ll get more than one result.