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.”
Here’s a before and after:
Frazer Harrison / Getty Images, Gary Gershoff/WireImage via Getty
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.”
Here’s a before and after:
Joe Corrigan / Getty Images, Joe Scarnici/FilmMagic via Getty
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.”
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.”
Here’s a before and after:
Noel Vasquez/Getty Images, amie McCarthy/WireImage) via Getty
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.
Here’s a before and after:
Phillip Faraone/FilmMagic via Getty, J. Merritt/Getty Images
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.'”
Here’s a before and after:
JB Lacroix/ WireImage via Getty, Rich Polk/Getty Images for Hulu
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.”
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.”
Here’s a before and after:
Larry Busacca / Getty Images, Anthony Devlin/PA Images via Getty Images
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.
Here’s a before and after:
Steve Granitz/WireImage via Getty, FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
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.”
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.”
Here’s a before and after:
Michael Tullberg/Getty Images, Disney Channel
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.”
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.
Here’s a before and after:
Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images, (c) Paramount/courtesy Everett Collection
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.”
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?'”
