In Hollywood, it’s traditionally the ladies for whom a hideous wig is the gateway to accolades — like Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich, or Nicole Kidman in The Hours. Lately, though, it’s the dudes who are getting all the attention for uglying up their head-suits. This fall, on screens big and small, we’re witnessing an epidemic of masculine follicular follies: multiple Federline coifs, some ill-advised dreadlocks, and one reedy Mohawk that looks like a tragic Flowbee accident. And they say men are afraid of commitment. Click through our slideshow to witness their wholehearted embrace of the hair make-under and then perhaps send a few bottles of shampoo to their managers. (For more from the Fug Girls, visit GoFugYourself.com.)
We know Norton is a Serious Actor, and if his cheesy mullet-cornrows were integral to getting into character as a scary, manipulative arsonist, then we fully endorse that as a healthy alternative to going Method via torching somebody’s barn. That being said, we firmly believe someone should have told him that he looks less like a bad-ass convict and more like K Fed — and even he hasn’t been scary since 2006.
The Coen brothers must have a fetish for memorably insane hairdos: Remember Javier Bardem–as–Dorothy Hamill in No Country for Old Men, and Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona? Granted, Bridges’s grimy, gnarly hair in this remake of the classic Western is period-appropriate and faithful to the original, and we appreciate that. But that doesn’t change our theory that if you wrung out his tresses, you’d have enough grease to deep-fry your Thanksgiving turkey.
Remember when Phillip Seymour Hoffman showed up at the Oscars wearing a black stocking cap, and explained that it was because he had really, really bad hair for a movie role, and everyone scoffed, “How bad could it be, Phil?” This bad, which … wow. That cap was the right call, dude. Consider our scoffing officially retracted.
Allegedly, Bale’s character in this flick has battled drugs and a criminal past. Why he chose to add his hair to that litany of woe is beyond us. It’s evocative of men who try to grow mustaches even though their follicles clearly can’t support the effort; like, sir, that’s not a Mohawk, that’s a string of false eyelashes. Either invest in some extensions or abandon ship.
You’ve seen this style for a while now, stretching from Phoenix’s allegedly fake breakdown right up to the release of the documentary for which it was cultivated. Knowing it was a put-on makes it no less repulsive — it’s what we imagine Santa looks like after his long post-Christmas holiday, when the elves pull him out of a Dumpster, give him a Tetanus shot, and chip away the evidence of his celebratory hedonism.
If this do looks familiar, it could possibly be because Penn is playing a real person: Valerie Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson. But we think it’s probably because this shellacked head-suit looks like the cranial middle-aged love child of Michael Douglas and Pat Riley.
The Kenny Powers mullet in Eastbound & Down’s first season was a thing of beauty — the platonic ideal of a mullet, in fact, and perhaps the worst hair we’ve ever seen on television. Which is why we’re relieved to see that his own flirtation with cornrows was a temporary blip for the season-two premiere, and that his curly hockey hair made a triumphant return in episode two. Someone, after all, has to show the hipsters how it’s done.
Wilson has long been the best thing about the (endless) Fockers phenomenon, and we wonder if executive producer Ben Stiller is punishing him for this transgression by forcing him to wear a hybrid of Farrah Fawcett’s old feathered do and John Ritter’s Three’s Company coif. Certainly this wig verges on follicular terrorism, and friends, we are at Defcon 1.
It’s a compliment to say that Thornton is an actor without vanity, in that he frequently seems comfortable looking scuzzy. Unfortunately, in his role as a veteran cop on the hunt for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, his coif betrays him: There is no way a man sporting the thinning wisps of an aging chemistry teacher who’s given up on himself will ever defeat somebody as hot as The Rock. It’s against the laws of nature and of Hollywood.
Confession: We have no idea what Malko’s hair looks like in this movie, because every still we’ve seen — and we’ve seen so very, very many — features him wearing the kind of gleefully ugly hats you’d expect to see on a salty horse trainer. If that’s what he’s choosing as his best foot (or noggin) forward, we’re forced to assume that whatever he’s hiding under there is ghoulish indeed.
Rockwell is also portraying an actual person — here, a man whose sister believes he was convicted wrongfully of murder. We won’t spoil the ending (in part because we can’t remember it), but we do know one thing of which he is definitely guilty: face-icide in the first degree. We might not have even noticed his bouffant were it not just north of a horrifying Brillo-prickly mustache-goatee combo that we reckon we could use to scrub the stains off our sinks.
Schwartzman’s cut is just a hair shy of being a ladies’ bob, and we suspect that it’s impossible to get a coif this artfully shaggy without paying a mint for a precision trim every week — thus making it technically somewhat financially out of reach for his hipster PI/writer character. But we might just be saying that because we’re jealous of how shiny it is. Seriously, what deep conditioner does he use?
The rumor mill suggests Ritter is a super-nice guy, and his Sean Walker is about the only rootable character on 24: Lost Edition. Sadly, we’re not so much cheering for him to find his missing fiancée as we are for him to rob a drugstore for some shaving cream and a five-blade Gillette: All that carefully sparse facial hair does is make him look untrustworthy and wussy. Don’t say he doesn’t have the time amid surviving a plane crash, getting shot at, and being on the lam, because he somehow found a moment to put all that gel in his locks. Priorities, man.
It’s not like Galifianakis has ever touted his rusty locks as a modern-day rival to Fabio’s. But in Due Date, they seem teased into an especially lively pubic shrub. Presumably he’s playing it all for laughs, given two other stills featuring equally wacky dos — a driver’s license picture that resembles the Heat Miser, and a black-and-white glamour shot that recalls Augustus Gloop — but it’s no less disturbingly hypnotic.
When you’re busy raising an army of dark wizards, torturing your rivals, dealing with a naughty pet snake, and trying to off a pesky bespectacled whippersnapper who simply will not die, there probably isn’t time for a complicated coif. But the Dark Lord might be more attractive to his minions — and therefore feel better about himself, commit fewer atrocities, and have tons more free time — if he visited the Hair Club for Wizards. Some nice bangs might distract from how he doesn’t have a nose, for example, and we hear there are super opportunities for advancement — every one of its presidents, after all, is also a client.
