Jamie Lee Curtis Revisits Wigmaker That Made Her ‘The Bear’ Hair
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Seconds after Jamie Lee Curtis walks through the door at Wigmaker Associates in Beverly Hills on a pre-strike July morning, the recently minted Oscar winner comes face-to-face with an army of famous names. There are rows upon rows of them, monikers covering heads made of canvas blocks that atelier owner Rob Pickens and his staff use to custom-make wigs worn by Ana de Armas in Blonde, Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things and Amanda Seyfried in Mank.
“I see many of my friends,” declares Curtis as she scans the shelves, pausing to pay special attention to one in particular. “Hi, honey! Here’s my sweet,” she says, planting a kiss on the one named Christopher Guest, her filmmaker husband since 1984. Then Curtis spots another. “I just worked with [Margo Martindale] on a fabulous show called The Sticky. It’s weird when you’re my age, you know all these people.”
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Even so — during a nearly two-hour visit to Pickens’ shop, a first consultation for a mystery film project — Curtis hardly acts the role of the seen-it-all Hollywood veteran. Curtis, who turns 65 in November, shakes every employee’s hand on arrival and is wide-eyed and curious, telling the wigmaker, “I’ve been in show business since I was 19 years old. My parents are movie stars. I’ve seen wigs and worn wigs for my whole life. I’m fascinated by what you do.”
Curtis’ work with the atelier can be traced back to reprising her iconic role as Laurie Strode in the rebooted Halloween franchise in 2018, working with the shop’s then-owner Victoria Wood, a Hollywood wigmaker with more than four decades of experience and a list of film/TV credits that features work with Barbra Streisand, Oprah Winfrey, Jamie Foxx and Sigourney Weaver.
“Victoria Wood walked up the stairs on my deck and as she walked toward me, I literally went like this: ‘I want to look like you. That’s everything I want right there. I want your glasses. I want your shirt. I want your hair.’ And Victoria Wood made me a wig that looked exactly like her own hair,” Curtis says of replicating the artisan’s style for her Halloween character. “I ordered her glasses. I wore a cross because she had on a cross, and I wore a shirt that was just like her shirt.”
(Modeling her look after Wood paid off when Entertainment Weekly needed a doppelganger as a stand-in for a shoot with photographer Art Streiber. The resulting image remains the only photograph from her enviable 45-year career as an actress that Curtis has on display in her Santa Monica home.)
In 2020, Wood handed the reins of her company to her protégé Pickens, who’s now 28. His path to wigmaking can be traced back to elementary school when a passion for entertainment ignited. “Hair was actually the last thing I wanted to do,” admits the Little Rock, Arkansas, native who, as a kid, dreamt he might one day be an architect or scenic designer. But at around 8 years old, his mother enrolled him in an acting class at a local children’s theater. The path to class required students pass through a scene shop, and Pickens became transfixed by the creative hub, typically home to set design, lighting, sound and costume departments.
“Then one day, I was backstage and saw them do a quick change and they ripped a wig off of someone’s head and I went, ‘Wait a minute.’ It was amazing to see this object that just looked so real be taken off a head and another put on during a costume change. I discovered that and became fascinated.”
Interest led him to eBay where he snagged a vintage book from the 1800s and dove straight in by teaching himself the exacting craft. “It was an old hairdressing and barbering book, and it had one little chapter on wig making that showed a diagram of the hook and needle. My mom gave me her credit card and let me order some lace, a needle and some hair. At like 8 years old, I laid a piece of lace and tried my first knot which was terrible,” Pickens recalls.
Years later, a drama teacher suggested that if he were serious about making wigs a career — Pickens had already launched a side hustle in high school by renting and selling his wares on a personal website — he should contact Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s production manager and costume designer Rafael Castanera. He took the advice and soon landed a gig helping Castanera create upwards of 60 wigs for a production of Les Misérables. “That was during my junior year of high school and it started a whole little theatrical design career,” details Pickens of his wunderkind beginnings. The journey continued after high school with a stint at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville before his grandmother put him in touch with actor Judge Reinhold, someone she had met casually at a dinner party.
The actor, best known for Beverly Hills Cop and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, forwarded him on to Linda Flowers, a veteran hair designer and department head with dozens of credits (The Hunger Games franchise, The Morning Show) and close collaborations with stars like Melissa McCarthy. After a quick phone call, Flowers then introduced him to Wood.
After a three-hour phone call, Wood invited Pickens out to Los Angeles for a nearly weeklong mini apprenticeship. When it was over, Wood encouraged Pickens to enroll in cosmetology school so he could hone his skills by learning all aspects of the hair industry including coloring. “She was extremely generous. She never once said, ‘You should work for me,’ or, ‘You should do this.’ She just offered up a week of her time,” Pickens says of Wood, whom he called “so kind and encouraging.” She eventually became a mentor and business partner as Pickens took her advice and moved to Los Angeles at age 20 for cosmetology school and a part-time job helping Wood in her Long Beach home. By the time he graduated, Wood booked a job creating wigs for the first season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud, which aired in 2017 and was toplined by Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon.
“Once I got out of school, I became the manager of her shop without a formal agreement and then one day, she was ready to kind of slow down and I was ready to start, so we came together with a formal agreement,” Pickens explains of the transition to take over the business a few years back.
When it came time to create a new set of wigs for the additional Halloween installments, 2021’s Halloween Kills and 2022’s Halloween Ends, Wood had stepped back, so Curtis and Pickens continued working together. “When I came in for my Halloween fitting, this is where I came,” says Curtis, admiring the atelier. “This is such an old idea and a new idea at the same time. It’s a tradition, which is what I love about this business.”
Curtis says she loves the environment Pickens and his team have created in the atelier and how it supports the creative process of building a character, a collaborative journey that involves many departments and is typically led by a filmmaker or show creator: “I feel elegant here. It’s cool. There’s usually lovely music playing. You have a beautiful team. It’s quiet. It isn’t fraught, because these kinds of decisions are very emotional when you’re creating a character.”
The first step finds an actor in Pickens’ chair for a fitting. He creates a mold of their head using cellophane and Scotch tape, on top of which he uses a marker to trace the hairline and contours. Once completed, the wrap is placed on a canvas block, which is shaped to match the actor’s head in a process called “padding the block.” Measurements may change depending on the specifics required for a character and whether the role calls for a different hairline or facial shape.
“We then take a canvas-and-cork block and actually hammer it to get the exact shape. It’s a good way to get some anger out,” Pickens says with a laugh. Pickens or his team of wigmakers then start building the wig by tying one strand at a time in a process that can take 50 to 150 hours, depending on the wig’s complexity, with costs ranging from $4,000 (for a toupee) to between $10,000 and $20,000 for most wigs. “Hair doesn’t grow on trees,” he says. “It’s a commodity.” In a few short years, Pickens and his Wigmaker Associates have also become in-demand commodities with a list of credits that includes Don’t Worry Darling and Babylon.
Curtis also worked with Pickens on a wig — based on the vision of series creator Christopher Storer — for her ferocious turn as matriarch Donna Berzatto on FX’s The Bear. “I was so moved to receive the script,” Curtis notes, admitting that when she heard Jeremy Allen White’s Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto mention his mother during an episode in the first season, she had a premonition the role would one day be hers. When her agent called to say that she’d been offered it, “My eyes filled with tears.”
But she knew that she couldn’t show up to the Chicago set with “Jamie hair” because that would’ve been too distracting. After asking Storer for his guidance, Curtis and Pickens teamed on making his wishes come to life. “I knew [the hair] had to move and that she would ultimately be pushing her hair out of the way with [the backs of her hands] because her hands were going to be covered in food all the time,” she says.
Moments after, she slips Donna’s wig back on for the first time since filming: “Instantaneously, without a pin, she exists. It’s shocking what you can do. It’s shocking to me how instantaneously the character shows up.”
Curtis is quick to call it a “collaborative art form” by paying respects to the creative contributions of everyone from set designers and costume experts to showrunners and hairstylists and everyone in between who has a hand in creating film and television. As for how a wig influences her process, she takes a beat. “What it does is it erases me and allows me to bring all my experience and sadness and rage and grief and complications and family dynamics and all the things you use as an actor. It’s the tool. It’s so freeing to look in the mirror and see something different. It informs everything. It changes everything.”
A version of this story first appeared in the July 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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