Before Sadie Sink’s role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day was made public, fans theorised the actress would appear as Jean Grey, the telepathic mutant from X-Men, because the women both have red hair.
The sleuths were right: Sink did play Grey, but not sporting her own red hair. Instead, the actress wore a red wig as layered as her character in the Marvel film.
Some viewers have criticised the styling of Sink’s hair in the film, questioning the choice to hide her natural hair and even saying it looked low quality for such a big-budget production.
Among the complaints were that the wig was too stiff and the colour felt off.
Still, others said they did not notice Sink was wearing a wig at all and accused peers of being nitpicky.
Industry professionals commonly use wigs on television and film sets for a number of reasons, including cost, ease of styling and protecting the natural hair of cast members.
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But the discourse around Sink’s wig in the film signals audiences’ increasing attention to such intricate production details.
Alessandro Bertolazzi, the hair and makeup designer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, said using a wig for Sink sped up and simplified the styling process.
He added that the volume and hair quality offered by a wig “makes a huge difference”.
When designing the wig, Bertolazzi said that he had been inspired by Billie Eilish and that he wanted something “cool, contemporary, fashionable, in the same time messy, even dangerous”.
Bertolazzi recalled his team working on the wig for around four weeks. They played with length, texture and colour.
In a key flashback scene in the film, Sink dons her natural hair, wavy and layered, in happier times before her sister is kidnapped.
In the film’s present day, as her character seeks answers after traumatic events, her hair is choppier with bangs.
Some viewers interpreted the style as a tribute to Jean’s sister Sara Grey (Olivia Booth-Ford), who had bangs in the flashback. Bertolazzi said that was not intentional, but “this interpretation is quite good”.
Bertolazzi said Sink was “happy” with the wig, but online, it was not a hit for everyone.
On social media, some have likened the hairstyle to that of a Roblox avatar or said they hoped that Sink would wear her natural hair in future films.
Jacy DeVault, who saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day in theatres, said she found Sink’s wig “distracting” and “off-putting”.
“I was really confused as to why she was wearing a wig because she has such beautiful, gorgeous hair,” DeVault said.
She added, “It just did not look super natural in the way that I would imagine Spider-Man surely has the budget for.”
Bertolazzi said he did not generally pay attention to online criticism and commentary – especially after the negative feedback around his hair and makeup design work on the 2016 film Suicide Squad, for which he won an Oscar.
“If you listen to everyone, you can’t be creative,” he said.
Representatives for Sink did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wigs are not new for the Spider-Man franchise. Kirsten Dunst, who played Mary Jane Watson in the trilogy starring Tobey Maguire, said she wore a half-wig in the first movie and a full one in the next.
Audiences may be scrutinising the wigs more because of the high volume of entertainment media and how visible the wigs can be in high definition, said Dawn Dudley, a wigmaker whose credits include Westworld and Ahsoka.
Today’s high-resolution digital cameras are far less forgiving than their film predecessors, Dudley said, highlighting any imperfections and emphasising details.
“The whole magic of what we do is tricking the eye to try to make it look real,” she said.
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Now, creating that illusion has become more difficult.
Dudley, who had seen only snapshots from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, said she thought Sink’s wig was “pretty successful”.
In the streaming era, Dudley added, production timelines have been shortened and budgets have been tightened, affecting wigmakers.
Jennifer Renee, a wigmaker whose credits include Saturday Night Live and American Sports Story, said poor planning in preproduction often left her working overtime to meet tight deadlines.
On a recent trip for a wedding, she said, she spent her free time working on a project.
A standard wig might take anywhere between 80 and 150 hours to make, Renee said, but she had a week to turn around a custom piece for a major streaming show. She took the job to not let a friend down.
That lack of foresight, Renee said, “puts the wigmaker and the hairstylist in a box, and it prevents us from doing our jobs”.
“You can only make so many miracles happen before something fails,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
