Yahoo Lifestyle "I Hate That They Made Me Do That": 15 Times Actors Transformed Or Destroyed Their Real Hair For A Role
Hair often feels like a major part of your personal identity. Sometimes, actors have to give up their preferred style in order to fully embody the character they were cast to play.
Here are 15 actors who underwent serious hair transformations for a role (and if they loved or hated it):
1.Here's Michael Cera in early 2024, before he bleached his hair for a role in the upcoming Wes Anderson flick, The Phoenician Scheme.
Ahead of his appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers that July, the producer told Seth that Michael wanted him to know beforehand that he'd gone blonde. The actor said, "Well, I kind of want to apologize for it a little bit. My hair is in a weird place right now. And I know this is going out on TV and everything, but that's all I wanted to say, really."
"The thing is, I can't cut it right now because then I'll have, like, frosted tips. Or I dye it back to my own color, and that just feels wrong," he said.
Here's a before and after:
2.This is what Ariana Grande's hair looked like a few years before she was cast as Cat Valentine on Victorious.
She "had to bleach [her] hair and dye it red every other week for the first 4 years of playing Cat...as one would assume, that completely destroyed [her] hair."
In a 2014 Facebook post, she said, "I now wear a wig on Sam & Cat. My real hair is back to brown and I wear extensions but I wear it in a pony tail because my actual hair is so broken that it looks absolutely ratchet and absurd when I let it down."
Here's a before and after:
3.Here's Leon Thomas III's hair in 2016, the year before he played Darryl in Detroit, which is set in the '60s.
He had to cut his dreads for the role. In 2023, he told the Zach Sang Show, "I hated that. I hate that they made me do that."
He said, "There was all this Oscar buzz before we even filmed it, so my team was like, 'Anything they need, we're doing it. Trust me.' So I was like, 'Alright.' And I cut my dreads for it, but honestly, I learned a lot. And because I cut my dreads, I got the role on Insecure."
Here's a before and after:
4.This is Rooney Mara's hair before she cut it to play Lisbeth Sanders in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
In 2011, she told Style magazine, "My wardrobe has completely changed. It had to, partly because of my hair and partly because I stopped feeling comfortable in what I used to wear."
"I don't feel comfy in those clothes anymore because I have been living as Lisbeth for 14 months," she said.
Here's a before and after:
5.Here's KJ Apa's naturally dark hair in A Dog's Purpose, which he filmed before he was cast as the iconic redhead Archie Andrews in Riverdale.
Dying his hair and eyebrows red required eight hours in the salon, and keeping them that way required touch-ups every two weeks.
In 2017, he told Teen Vogue, "It was definitely really weird to see, but now I can't really remember what it was like before. I heard that only two percent of the population of the world has red hair so I'm feeling pretty good right now."
Here's a before and after:
6.Here's Joey King's hair the year before she shaved it off to play Gypsy Rose Blanchard in The Act.
In 2018, she told Allure, "I've never really had an attachment to my hair. I couldn't care less what happens to it. No part of me was nervous or was second-guessing it. So many people would ask me, 'Are you really scared?' or 'Are you nervous?' or say, 'You're so brave.' And I'd go, 'I'm not brave. I'm just cutting my hair off.'"
She added, "I know this sounds crazy, and not a lot of people will agree with me, but I think every woman should shave her head at least once in her life."
This was actually the third time Joey shaved her head. At age 11, she shaved it for The Dark Knight Rises, and at age 14, she shaved it on camera for Wish I Was Here.
Here's a before and after:
7.Here's Tom Hiddleston's naturally blonde hair before he played the titular role in Loki.
At Megacon Orlando, he said, "Both seasons of Loki, I've used my own hair. I've grown it out, and I've dyed it."
"It's always a moment when the dye goes in...It's quite strange. It is a transformation, that first day when it's dyed. Brushing my teeth at the end of the day, I go, 'Oh, there he is!'"
Here's a before and after:
8.This is what Daniel Radcliffe's hair looked like before he got extensions for the role of Igor in Victor Frankenstein.
In 2013, he told The Graham Norton Show, "It's real, dead human being's hair...It's from, I assume, a dead person or a person that donated their hair."
Alex Bailey / TM & copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved / courtesy Everett Collection, BBC / Via youtube.com
Here's a before and after:
9.This is what Cynthia Erivo's hair looked like a few months before she was cast as Elphaba in Wicked.
Before filming, she shaved her head so that her scalp could be painted green under her wigs.
The Walt Disney Company via Getty Images, © Universal Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection
In 2024, she told Vanity Fair she "would love to do that again."
Here's a before and after:
10.This is what James Marsters's hair looked like on Northern Exposure, a few years before he began playing Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The label bottle of bleach he used to get Spike's platinum hair warned that it should only be used every six weeks, but he "did it every eight days, because a vampire is dead so your hair doesn't grow so you can't have roots."
In 2016, James told the Minnesota Star Tribune, "They told me repeatedly my hair would fall out or rather they were not sure I would have hair by the end...The makeup department was really particular: There can never be roots in your hair. So for seven years we did it every episode. I agreed to bleaching when I thought I was going to die in five episodes. I don't know if I would have agreed to it for seven years."
Here's a before and after:
11.Here's what Hayley Kiyoko's hair looked like before Lemonade Mouth.
In a 2022 TikTok, she said, "I've been holding onto this secret for so long – almost 10 years – and I feel like I have to tell you the truth about Stella’s haircut. It wasn’t supposed to be asymmetrical. We were going for a symmetrical look, and my hair stylist cut my hair too short on one side, and we didn’t have enough time to get extensions to even it out."
She continued, "So, we rocked the asymmetrical look … and we made it Stella’s vibe – and that is how Stella got her haircut and some of you got yours too.”
Here's a before and after:
12.Here's Tom Felton with his natural blonde hair in a pre-Harry Potter role in Anna and the King.
To play Draco Malfoy, he famously bleached his hair, which was "agony" and "felt like fire ants were nibbling at your scalp."
In his 2022 memoir Beyond the Wand, he wrote, "Then, they said they’d have to do it all again and I begged them not to. My plea fell on deaf ears: I was straight back in the hairdresser’s chair. It initially took six or seven rounds over a matter of days to achieve the color. It was important to the filmmakers that the coloring was just right. They needed to see how the Malfoy blonde looked next to the Weasley ginger or the Granger brown."
Here's a before and after:
13.Here's Kevin Bacon in 1982, a few years before the $1500 haircut that "sort of started that kind of, you know, thing, with the look," leading to his casting as Ren McCormack in Footloose.
At the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, he said, "I thought to myself…they told me that the haircut was going to cost $1,500, which is an outrageous amount of money in 1984, right?" He shot a few scenes, but the production scene sent a studio head a compilation of him "trying to be cool" during a wardrobe test.
He said, "They started playing it, and she watched, the legend is, she watched 30 seconds, the lights were still out, she stood up, and said, 'Yeah, you can hire him, that's fine.'"
Here's a before and after:
14.This is what Kaley Cuoco's hair looked like in The Big Bang Theory Season 7, before she debuted the pixie cut she got for the role of Katy in the indie movie Burning Bodhi.
In The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series, she said, "At that point, we were heading into our eighth season, and something needed to shake up. I was bored and sick of the hair, and what's funny is I thought by cutting my hair, I would spend less time in the hair and makeup chair, even though I loved the hair and makeup team."
However, the decision ultimately "bit [her] in the ass."
She said, "I was like, this is the worst decision! What was I thinking?! I thought I was cutting off all this time because I hated going in and getting ready. That's why I was wearing my hair up so much in season six and seven. So then I cut it, and it ended up being more work because it wasn't easy to style."
Here's a before and after:
15.And finally, here's Keri Russell's hair before her infamous onscreen haircut in Felicity Season 2.
At the 2018 ATX TV Festival, she said, "The way it all totally went down was they were wrapping up the first season…and the hair people were putting away everything they had into boxes, and there was a little boy's wig. We put it on me at like 2 in the morning as a joke…and we took a Polaroid, and over the summer, we thought it'd be really funny to send to J.J. [Abrams] and Matt [Reeves] and say, 'I cut my hair — hope you like it.' Totally as a joke...I was with my girlfriends at some lake, and I got this phone call…and [J.J.] said, 'Hey, we got your picture.' No laughing. No nothing. 'Would you really cut your hair?' And I was like, 'I guess?'"
She actually got her haircut on camera.
She said, "We shot that scene at like 4 a.m. on a Friday. And the hair girl actually...it's in slow motion, like her cutting my hair, sniping it. And then a few hours later, I went to a hair salon, and someone cut the rest of it off."
Here's a before and after:
Which hair transformation do you think the actor should've kept? Let us know in the comments!
