Tell me if this sounds familiar at all. You’re watching a movie. You’re getting into the story. You’re lost inside its fictional reality.
And then all of a sudden: Something just feels … off. But you can’t quite put your finger on it. You might even pause the film and just stare at the screen to figure it out.
When this vague sense of off-ness happens to me while watching a movie, nine times out of ten it’s because of the same reason: Reshoot hair. That’s the extremely technical term for when a Hollywood star shoots an entire film with a distinctive (and usually natural) haircut, then goes off to work on another project — at which point they change their hair. Maybe they had long hair on the first film and their new role demands a buzz cut; maybe they had a bob and now they’ve got waves.
And therein lies the problem. When the initial project needs reshoots, the Hollywood star no longer looked the way they did during the initial production — and, even worse, their ongoing work on the second project means they can’t cut their hair to go back to the way they originally looked. Anytime that happens, you run the risk of a nasty case of reshoot hair, which can pop up from scene to scene, or occasionally from shot to shot. When it does, it’s beyond distracting.
Below, I’ve collected a dozen of the most egregious examples I know of, with side-by-side comparison shots so you can see both their original look and their reshoot hair (or reshoot beard, or, in one very notorious case, reshoot CGI upper lip). If you were able to watch these movies without noticing this stuff before, I’m jealous. But be warned: Once you see this kind of thing, you’ll never be able to unsee.
The Worst Reshoot Hair in Movies
Sometimes a bad wig or haircut makes it very clear when a film has done reshoots. Here are 10 of the most blatant examples.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky