A hairstyle can become burned in your brain, especially depending on the circumstances around the person who is wearing it. Candy Montgomery was dubbed as the perfect homemaker and mother, but her hair takes on an iconic life of its own for Hulu’s true crime limited series, Candy. Hair Department Head, Katie Ballard, had to create not one but two iconic looks for Jessica Biel’s title character, and, with some subtle movies, Ballard takes us back to the 1980s.
Ballard pulled a lot of wigs from her personal hair closet for a lot of the looks in Candy, and she revealed that she only built a few pieces. You would never be able to tell that she is using an actor’s real hair, since the pieces places on their heads transform the shape of their faces.
“We only had two full custom builds and the rest ended up being wigs in my stock. Some that we ended up putting new fronts on is something that we do in order to save us some time. For Candy and Betty we built for, but for some of the guys, some of their character development comes as it goes. For Tim [Simons] and Pablo [Schreiber], Robin Veith and Michael Uppendahl were hoping to use their real hair, and the guys had been growing it out for us. People wear their hair so short on the sides that it wasn’t long enough by the time they came to start shooting. I wanted to wig them to get the look I wanted. For Tim, I used a wig that I had in stock and Pablo had one that we put a new front on. Those were from my personal stock, and we put new fronts on them to get the look I wanted.”
For the majority of the series, Ballard had to perfect a simple perm. We have known Biel for over two decades on television, and she is almost unrecognizable in her first look. It is the perm heard round the world, and Ballard revealed a fun Easter egg to who gave her that do.
“That is a fun, little tidbit in the book but we didn’t get to touch on in the book. Her friend, Sherry Cleckler, was Candy’s hairdresser, and it was important to us to do her permed look. That’s who she was during the murder, and the blow-out was something her legal team advised her to do. The perm is something that Sherry had given to her.”
In some shots, it look like Candy’s perm glowed like a halo as if the people from her town couldn’t possibly believe she would commit such a heinous act of violence. The blow-out that comes later in the five-part series is a more calculated look.
“It wasn’t talked about beforehand with me, but a lot of times I let the wigs have a natural, fuzzy texture. If it looks too perfect, it looks like a wig. When it was curly, it was a happy accident, but in the courtroom was kind of talked about. The first courtroom scene we shot was when she was on the stand, so that was our most polished look with the blown-out style. Then Jessica and I talked about letting it be looser when she wasn’t on the stand. For that, we let there be fly-aways, so it looked a little more natural, but we wanted her on the stand to be her most polished look. With the curly look, we really talked about her morning routine, because we needed to see how she would prepare herself when she would go back to the Bible school after the murder. I told her that if she had a perm like this, it would be a crunch and go style. Maybe some product or hit it with a hairdryer. We let it be this easy, wash-and-go style.”
Betty Gore didn’t change her hair for a number of years, and finding that dome-like shape was an interesting journey for Ballard. While Candy is always complimented on being put-together, it is a bit more of a struggle for Betty. She doesn’t hide the insecurities as well as Candy can.
“We had some pictures of her, and I immediately noticed that she always had this graduated cut. When she was younger, it was shorter and it was perfect. People note Dorothy Hamill a lot with Betty’s hair, but in the pictures, you can tell it was well cut when she was younger. The silhouette is very professional, but then as she got older, it got droopier in the back. Maybe even a little lopsided. I wondered if when she was getting older and having kids if she was taking care of it herself. The most famous picture is her on the couch with her arms around the two kids, and the cowlick is there. That’s become an iconic image to me at this point. When I first started to work on Melanie [Lynskey], I wanted to make sure I included the cowlick. I didn’t want it to be oversophisticated, so it was more like her everyday life. We made sure to add where she would have that cowlick. When she is going to work, she would probably blow dry her fringe in the morning. We tried to keep it as organic to the real Betty in terms of what she was wearing throughout the day.”
What is the art of the blow-out? In order for Candy to appeal more to the judges, Ballard replicated her courtroom scene with some alterations to make sure it enhanced Biel’s face.
“The main concern of mine was how it framed Jessica’s face, so we tweaked it slightly from how the real Candy wore hers. A lot of getting that curl is finding the right amount of feathering to make it look like a sophisticated look. It had to come together organically the first time. It’s really about the hairdresser’s process, and you have to listen to the hair in terms of it telling you where it wants to go.”
Men’s hairstyling of this time period gets a bad reputation, but it should be noted how well Ballard captured the time period on all of the cuts on the men as well. There are certain shots of the back of Pablo Schreiber’s head that you can’t clock as a wig or something artificial.
“That was a big thing that I almost got on my soapbox about. Unless they had a military background, men wore their hair heavy over their ears and in the back. SO many people are so into tapers and fades now, and that was my main pitch for wigging both of them. It’s hard to fill that in artificially. For both of them, we wanted to maintain a natural texture, and, especially for Pablo, we figured Alan would be a character who would go to a highbrow hair salon. He wouldn’t get the most expensive cut, but we did polish him up for when he starts having an affair with Candy. We called it the Dude Feather. A lot of the guys would feather their hair in the front, and everyone would blow-dry their hair at the time.”
Candy is streaming now on Hulu.
