This story contains spoilers for The Rhythm Section. You've been warned.
When the trailer for Blake Lively's new movie, The Rhythm Section, first dropped, I barely recognized her. I've spent almost 15 years, since I first cried my way through The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, in complete fascination of Lively's hair. Obviously, my admiration has only grown in the time since, through the Gossip Girl years and Lively's continued big-screen career and myriad red-carpet appearances.
And yet those famous long blond waves are distinctly missing from The Rhythm Section, along with her American accent. Instead, Lively sports a number of different looks in the film as her character, Stephanie Patrick, transforms herself from a tortured young woman to an undercover assassin seeking revenge. Yes, it's quite the narrative, and one that required hair and makeup designer Siân Grigg to oversee an entire team dedicated to handling Lively's wigs for the film. "She had so many different looks, and they were really important because you absolutely have to believe them," Grigg says. "Otherwise, it blows her cover."
Grigg and her team also knew that some of the wigs they chose were supposed to look somewhat fake, as if the character had bought them herself. "We still wanted them to look good, because she was obviously a smart girl and would not put something on her head that looked ridiculous," she says. "But, also, we had to play that line that it's a wig she's bought in a shop."
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"Blake was super collaborative and really loves playing around with ideas," Grigg says, which isn't always the case when it comes to on-set hair and makeup. "She didn't care if she looked terrible and didn't mind how much time it took. She wanted to look absolutely right for the part." She says the actor is one of those people who can pull off pretty much any color, which she does in the movie. "She's just a lucky person like that—she's quite a chameleon, so you can do a lot with her," Griggs adds.
They luckily had a wig shop in Ireland (where some of the filming took place) that was willing to loan the production about 40 wigs to play with. "We tried so many different types—straight, curly, long, short," Grigg says. "We had a lot to choose from."
The character is in a really rough place in her life at the start of The Rhythm Section, and that grounds her journey throughout the rest of the film. "You really had to believe that she's completely given up on herself. She was almost like a nonhuman," Grigg says. "She was just going through the motions, but she wasn't really alive. She was just getting through it, really."
"We started off with a shoulder-length mousy brown wig," says Grigg, "the idea being that she's not done anything to herself the whole time [since her family died]. But when we put it on her, we realized it wasn't quite right." After talking it over with Lively and others on the team, they went through every color option. "In the end, we decided that she had home-bleached her hair at some point, and then she'd put some crazy color through it at one point, and the end result were these nasty canary-yellow peroxide ends that were virtually grown out," Grigg says. "And there was a haircut that she'd sort of done herself. It was meant to look like she didn't care."
The hair and makeup team really had to work hard to "deglamorize" Lively, which I can only imagine was no small task. "We had many meetings over which wigs, how it was going to be, what color was going to be on the ends of that wig at the start," she says. "We literally went through every crazy color until we got to this disgusting yellow, because it was hard to find something that made Blake look worse. We just wanted her to look gray and ill. That was the best least attractive shade we could find for her."
Lively's second look in the film, a short brown ’do, had to make sense in the plot, so they couldn't just go off on a total tangent while choosing the wig. "The cut had to be something that was similar to the cut she'd had," Grigg says. "It had to be shorter, basically—we had boundaries. We didn't want it to look like she'd just gone and had her hair blown out and she was suddenly a completely different character. But, also, we wanted her to look good for that bit, and to be able to look the part for the character that she was taking on, as the double agent sort of thing."
Lively has a couple different looks in red wigs, and Grigg was correct: She looks great in both. The first is a simpler look but certainly a more polished version of the character as she moves further along in her new, undercover life. How much fun would it be to try out regret-free bangs that will never need to be grown out?
But it's the most glammed-up version of Lively that seems to have inspired some of her red-carpet looks for the movie's press tour. "She had the red look where she was a high-class escort, and we had a lot of fun with that, I have to say," Grigg tells Glamour. "That was sort of our fantasy hairdressing moment, where we could do something really lovely. And Blake had lots of ideas for that as well. We sort of based it on Bettie Page and referenced retro ’50s and ’40s looks—but an updated version, like how people would interpret it now rather than being totally accurate to the hair of the period. She looked absolutely amazing. It was very agent provocateur."
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Grigg explained that the process of hiding Lively's hair so that her wigs looked realistic was quite labor-intensive and technical—you don't want any weird bumps at the nape of the neck or elsewhere. Basically, her hair was wrapped around her head in a circle while wet, and they used conditioner to help mat it down onto Lively's head so it was as tight and smooth as possible. "It was quite a feat," Grigg says. "I think it took a good 40 minutes to wrap that hair before you get the wig on. If you've got wet hair, it's easier to manage and we tend to use conditioner, because then at least it's good for her hair while it's wrapped under the wig, like a conditioning treatment every day."
The Rhythm Section is now in theaters nationwide.
