Courtesy Open RoadThere are many perks to being a rich and famous actor, not the least of which is that you always have a glam squad at the ready. Heading to a big red carpet event? Cue the hair and makeup team! Running from the gym to your car in front of a swarm of paparazzi? Cue the hair and makeup team! A-listers almost never have to face down the lens of a camera without picture-perfect pampering.
Except when the director says so. When a celeb signs up to be in a movie that asks for the character to have locks different than their own, they are often at the mercy of however merciless the crew is feeling at the current moment. (Or such is the only explanation for some looks.) The result is, some very, very bad wigs. They range from incredibly fake-looking to just downright unflattering, often for no discernible reason other than somebody felt like screwing with the star.
These actors probably hope and pray that the world will not live to remember these wigs, but alas, we at E! have the memories of elephants. Every last tacky 'do is burned into our brains, and it is here now that we give them their due attention yet again. We're going to start with Shailene Woodley's in Snowden, out today, because honestly it was all we could do not to gawk at it the entire time. The flick told the very harrowing (and still ongoing) tale of whistle blower Edward Snowden, who decided to out the U.S. government for its surveillance program.
Director Oliver Stone made a lot of very disturbing points about the bargain that citizens make for our current security programs, and sparked some great debates on the issue of patriotism, but we weren't able to pay attention to any of it. Because of the wig.
Woodley plays Lindsay Mills, who is the girlfriend to Edward Snowden and also a very real person with hair that looks nothing like this. (And is much prettier, we should add!) Woodley donned this baffling wig for much of her early scenes in the movie during which she courts young Snowden and teaches him her liberal-leaning ways. We assume that the movie's production team chose to give her said hair because they wanted the audience to be tricked into thinking that she is actually Jenny from Forrest Gump, and that it was 1970 and not the 2010s.
Of course, we can't speak for them, and there is also the possibility that Shailene showed up to set last-minute with, like, blonde hair, and that the movie just could not go on unless she was a brunette. It is worth pointing out, though, that later in the movie while Lindsay and Edward are living in Hawaii and he is plotting to steal all his secret documents, Shailene's real hair is back. The mystery of cinema!
Next we journey back to this spring and Julia Roberts' Mother's Day contraption. We tried to think of some eloquent descriptive words to paint a verbal picture, and here's what we came up with: It is orange. It is a bob. It is layered. It has bangs.
The best part of this particular wig is its origin story. It actually dates all the way back to Roberts' 1999 rom-com Notting Hill—it is the exact same one that she wore to play world famous actress Anna Scott, who falls in love with Hugh Grant, the lowly bookshop owner. (In particular, it was during a scene in which Julia-slash-Anna was playing an astronaut for a movie-within-the-movie. Meta!) It seems as though Julia had such a fondness for the wig—the fact that she kept it in her possession for nearly two decades is evidence enough—that she elected to resurrect the hairpiece for Mother's Day.
And the world (and the Internet) was eternally grateful.
What to say about Taylor Lautner in Twilight? He assumed the character—nay, the very essence of—Jacob Black, a half-boy, half-wolf. And just how does a movie team convince audiences that Taylor Lautner is part wolf? With this long, flowing, luscious black locks!
Lautner himself was no stranger to the majesty of this wig, even admitting that he competed for screen time with the breakout wig star. "The wig, it was a very important co-star," he once told MTV. "It did not like me, I did not like it." And there you have it.
Another phenomenon we should devote some time to is the Reshoots Wig. Sometimes when a movie has gone in a direction that the studio doesn't like, or is otherwise a bit of a mess, production will be called back for a small do-over. These are a logistical nightmare, requiring the wrangling of actors' schedules and also dealing with the fact that they don't look the same that they did during the original shoot. Enter Kate Mara in Fantastic Four.
This beleaguered superhero flick had a lot of trouble that we don't really believe is any one person's fault, so we don't want to be too harsh. But this wig cannot get off scot-free. It is a personal offense to Kate Mara, who had beautiful blonde hair during 80% of the movie. Is it her fault that they scheduled the reshoots after she had gone back to her auburn roots? Does she deserve to carry this wig burden, forever thrust into the history books of straw on scalps? We all must stand by Kate, as she is the innocent victim, this wig her assailant.
Last on our list of wig wrongs that need to be righted is Nicolas Cage's Con Air...contraption. This man's mop is a character in itself. The lore of Nicolas Cage's hair is one of Hollywood's oldest tales. This wig was a black spot on that history. He is basically the star of this movie, taking on the role of a recently-paroled army ranger who must fly home aboard a plane full of miscreants (the "cons," if you will) and then subsequently defend it from being hijacked by them.
He says things like "What do you think I'm gonna do? I'm gonna save the day," but most importantly, he wears this extraordinary mullet. No one can say exactly why this particular character needed such a wig, other than he was Southern, and apparently Nicolas Cage and the team behind Con Air think that everyone in the south wears mullets.