The TV news business isn't always pretty.
As the co-hosts of Today revealed during Friday's broadcast, there were people throughout their journalism careers who couldn't accept them just as they were.
The conversation got started when they brought up recent remarks from Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain. The famously red-headed star recently told Refinery29 that she won't dye her hair for a role. "If I wanted to dye my hair, I could, but I realized that's who I am, and my differences [make me] special," she told the website. As an alternative, she uses wigs to get into her many characters.
The comments launched a conversation between Matt Lauer, Hoda Kotb, Al Roker and Sheinelle Jones, all journalists who have racked up years—if not decades—in front of the camera. Turns out—they weren't immune to bosses' physical demands.
As Kotb recalled, when she first started at NBC, bosses told her, "That hair—no good. Those blazers—not great." She said her superiors even went through her wardrobe and picked out what they didn't like.
The story was familiar to Jones, who said she was once asked to cut her hair like Halle Berry and change the spelling of her name. Kotb echoed her colleague. "They added an 'e' on the end [of my last name] thinking that somehow buying a vowel would make my name easier to pronounce," Kotb remembered. "I don't think so."
For Roker, the main gripe was with his glasses. The lenses were reflecting the light, so a news director got him contact lenses and frames without glass in them. "Of course, people started calling like, 'What is going on? Does he think he's Clark Kent?'" Roker said. "It lasted about a month."
Meanwhile, it worked the opposite way for Lauer, who famously cut all his hair in 2002. While the change was his own decision (and a secret one until he emerged the next day), he said bosses gave him some second looks.
As he recalled, "I had people looking at me like, 'Why did you do that?'"