Four movies about The Beatles are currently in production. There will be one movie for each Beatle, and director Sam Mendes has said that the four movies will be the “first binge-able theatrical experience.” No one has explained exactly what this means yet. Will all four be released to theaters at the exact same time in April 2028? On consecutive days? Weeks? It’s unclear.
But we do have some sense of what these movies will look like. Last week, a picture from the set went viral. In it, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, playfully flip off the camera. The attention, though, was not on the costumes, or the flipping off, or even the actors themselves. Everyone was focused on how wiggy the wigs looked. This is presumably an expensive production, so why does the hair look like that?
To find out, I contacted an expert. Ashley Jensen has worked as a hair and makeup artist for almost 20 years. She is in the 706 hair union and describes herself, when we talk on the phone, as “hair-forward” in her work. She is not working on the Beatles movies, nor does she know the people who are, but she was able to help me figure out why these wigs felt so unsettling to me.
The first question was an obvious one: Why use wigs at all, when these men have full heads of hair? “Sometimes it is a lot easier to use a wig,” Jensen said. “It’s easier to switch between styles, and it preserves their hair for the run of a show. If you’re [shooting for] four to seven months it can take a toll on your hair.” Wigs can also be good for continuity between shots, making sure that a character can wear different hairstyles, and some actors just prefer them.
But the problem here isn’t that the actors are wearing wigs. A lot of actors wear wigs in movies, and they don’t get called “muppets” and cause people to question the “current status of wigs in Hollywood.” When I look at this photo, the wig on the far right doesn’t bother me that much. But the others do.
“The Beatles definitely had some real moppy hair, so it’s not that this is so far off. It’s just that there are ways in which I think they could have tweaked them to make it not take you [the viewer] out of it,” Jensen said. “Hair—wig or not— should feel like it’s supporting the story and the character and the actor, not taking away.”
It’s possible that on camera and in motion, these wigs might look more realistic than in this still shot taken of the actors on set. But the root problem with these wigs, Jensen and I land on, is that “in the case of the Beatles, they didn’t have someone doing their hair all the time. It needs to feel organic and not look so stylized. It needs to be able to move. It needs to have a kind of random texture to it to feel like a real person’s hair. It’s a really fine line between something feeling stylized and organic.”
Wigs, I learn, are made with a lot of hair. A shit-ton of hair, even. There are way more hairs packed onto a good wig that a hair and makeup team might buy than most people in the world are blessed to have on their heads. Jensen pointed out the parts on these wigs. See how straight they are? How perfect? Real hair doesn’t look like that. “They’re not super far off from what the guys had, but it’s that the part feels too perfect,” she said. Almost every wig she works with, she tells me, she thins out. “Even though these guys had a lot of hair, you thin that out at the top on a wig. You pluck hair off that part,” she said.
The wigs could also be a little messier. They could be tacked down a little more gently in the front. It’s possible that these wigs are not custom-made for the heads of the actors, and so the hair and makeup department has to make do with what they are given. All hair and makeup artists in Hollywood are contractors. They do not have very much authority on a set, and even when the directors respect them and value their input, they still often have to advocate for what they need in order to do their jobs well.
“A lot of people don’t necessarily understand fully how things break down on a set. Even if it’s a high-budget [production], that doesn’t mean that they’ve allotted that for the hair department,” Jensen said. A multi-million dollar production might devote the budget to big stars or special effects or any number of things that are not hair and makeup. We cannot know, as outsiders looking at this picture of the Beatles movie sets, what exactly the hair and makeup team had to work with. If they had an infinite budget (unlikely), we would assume that they did a half-ass job. But it’s way more likely that they are working under budgetary restraints that make it hard for them to get perfect wigs.
“Sometimes there’s a lack of understanding of what things really cost and what it takes to make something look good on screen.” A full custom wig, Jensen told me, can cost thousands and thousands of dollars. That’s a wig that would be custom-made for the head of each specific actor so that it sits correctly. But each actor might need multiple styles or lengths for the duration of filming, and that many custom wigs can add up quickly for a film’s budget. A lot of productions opt instead for high-quality non-custom wigs that are then altered (thinned out, cut, styled, etc) for the film and the actor.
Hair and makeup isn’t necessarily the primary concern for everyone making a movie. So many people (directors, producers, the actors themselves) have more decision-making power and control than the people who must place the wigs on the actors’ heads each day. The hair and makeup artists do not have final say. “What gets really difficult as an artist is that sometimes it’s so out of your hands, and you’re just trying the best you can,” Jensen said. “You might even tell someone that you don’t think the hair is quite right, or there’s a continuity issue you see, but they might not care.”
In this case, I am giving these wigs not a red card, but a yellow card. Maybe these wigs are the best they can do. Maybe they’ll look better on screen. But I’m not optimistic. They’re just too wiggy.