There’s a thousand things about characters that will never get mentioned explicitly in a movie or TV series, but are still true. These personality and world-building details don’t just help the actors understand who they’re playing but help every department better support the story and give us insight into the characters’ inner lives. For instance, it has yet to be confirmed as canon on “The Bear,” but hair department head Ally Vickers has made real creative decisions based on the fact that Sugar (Abby Elliot) probably watched “Gossip Girl.”
Vickers has just come off “The Bear” Season 3 and an Emmy nomination for her Season 2 work on Episode 6, “Fishes,” but told IndieWire that her process for developing hairstyles hasn’t changed that much from the start of “The Bear.” She always considers the environmental details: How much characters care (or have time to care) about their appearance, the pieces of media that were formative for them growing up, and even which songs match their specific vibe.
Although Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) is probably not participating in Brat Girl Summer, nonetheless, Vickers leaned on the music of Lana Del Ray and specifically the song “Salvatore” when planning out her hairstyle. Co-creator Chris Storer gave Vickers a picture of Monica Vitti as inspiration, and Vickers created not just a mood board but a tiny mood movie with “Salvatore” playing underneath a carousel of images of Vitti and many others.
The moving mood board helped to communicate the kind of throwback, controlled salon look Vickers wanted to give to Donna and the feeling she wanted the Berzatto family matriarch to have, too: a little glamorous, slightly dated, and extremely Italian. “That woman, she goes to the salon, she keeps things up, she gets her hair done,” Vickers told IndieWire. “That was a really fun transformative look for Jamie Lee Curtis, too, because we haven’t seen her in a look like that in a long time, if ever, really.”
Donna’s hair is also a look that transformed over the course of the episode. The benefit of structured hair is that it can also morph under the pressure of, just for instance, putting together a Feast of the Seven Fishes. “We really wanted her to come undone,” Vickers said. “One of my reference points was ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.’ She’s so beautiful, and she’s so put together, and then it all unravels. It was about really setting that wig in the morning and then just letting it fall apart.”
Whether showing the passage of time or transporting a character back in time, hair is one of the key indicators that the characters are in a different place. But you can’t overcook the changes — or, at least, on a show as naturalistic as “The Bear,” you don’t have to. “I really feel like you can tell a real story through somebody’s hair, and it doesn’t have to be major changes all the time,” Vickers said. “[For ‘Fishes’], we just let Jeremy’s hair get a little curlier — we skipped a haircut to let it be a bit longer and changed the part. That makes him look a little younger; that speaks to a different time in his life.”
Although Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) is never truly concerned with his hair (and doesn’t need to be, that’s how gorgeous it is on its own), Sugar is one of the people on “The Bear,” Vickers thinks, who does regularly change her hair and experiments with different things — but pulling off a different color required a faster process than even Chef Terry’s (Olivia Colman) Michelin-star machine could turnaround deep dish pizza. “We had to have her back to blonde by Monday, picking up a scene that had already been established, and we shot [‘Fishes’] that Saturday. So Saturday night, we were at the salon getting her back to blonde,” Vickers said. “That was so cool to be able to pull that off.”
Whatever amount of effort was required to make changes to the cast’s hair, seeing those changes in action on set let Vickers know that “Fishes” was going to be a very special episode of the series. “I want my work to really just reflect that and be part of the atmosphere but not a distraction at all. It’s so important to me,” Vickers said. “When we were filming that episode, it was like, ‘Wow, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ It just felt so special to be part of and I really wanted our hair to add to the story.”
“The Bear” is available to stream on Hulu and Disney+.
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