1.Emilia Clarke wore a wig to play the icy-haired Daenerys for the first seven seasons of Game of Thrones, but for the last season, she decided to actually go platinum and forgo the wigs. However, the bleach it required ended up severely damaging her hair, causing her to cut it into a chin-length bob. “My hair was, like, dying!" Clarke told Harper’s Bazaar UK. I’m honestly trying to grow out the blonde, because it’s just killed my hair, and I miss having nice hair!
2.Her GoT costar Sophie Turner also dealt with a hair disaster. A natural blonde, Turner was constantly dying her hair red for the show and then blonde again — and one of these times, her hair never recovered. "A few years ago, I was trying to go back from red to blonde, and it destroyed my hair to the point that I had to use a wig for Game of Thrones," she told Glamour. "They wouldn't let me dye it back red, or my hair would've fallen out." She later clarified that it was not the GoT red they were stripping out, but red from another role that "ruined" her hair.
3.Robert Pattinsonhad to change his hair up multiple times during the filming of Good Time, and as a result, his bangs in particular started falling out. "Some scenes they peroxided my bangs. They changed my hair color so many times that some of my hair fell out," he told Page Six of the "exhausting shoot."
4.British actor Danny Dyer actually threatened to sue the network after losing his hair due to dying it ginger for All in the Game. "I couldn't get it out of my hair. It took me six months. I couldn't f***ing get it out. I kept washing it. ... I'm receding a bit but it only started after I dyed it," Dyer claimed, saying that he was considering suing Channel 4.
5.Keira Knightly didn't have a particular film to blame, but she did say dyeing her hair constantly for different roles damaged her hair so much that she had to wear wigs for five years. “I have dyed my hair virtually every color imaginable for different films. It got so bad that my hair literally began to fall out of my head!” She called wearing wigs "the greatest thing that’s ever happened to my hair.”
6.January Jones similarly had issues with her hair as a result of multiple films and dye jobs, including Sweetener. "I have been every color and now my hair is falling out in clumps," she said at Sundance in 2013. "I've been blonde, red with extensions for this film [Sweetener], then blonde, then black, and now blonde again. I'm going to have to shave it off and wear a wig."
7.We all know Ariana Grande for her signature high pony. Well, it turns out it's because of her many years of dying her hair red to appear as Cat on Victorious. Apparently, creator Dan Schneider didn't want all his main female cast members to be brunette, which explains why Cat was a redhead and Jade had black/streaked hair, despite both of them being natural brunettes.
"I had to bleach my hair and dye it red every other week for the first 4 years of playing Cat… as one would assume, that completely destroyed my hair. ... I wear it in a ponytail because my actual hair is so broken that it looks absolutely ratchet and absurd when I let it down," Grande wrote in a Facebook post.
8.A similar thing happened to Hilarie Burton in One Tree Hill. After two seasons of intense curling and bleaching, her hair was so damaged she had to cut her hair and return to a more natural color for Season 3.
9.A natural blonde, Jennifer Lawrence had to dye her hair dark brown to play the brunette Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games series. Preferring her blonde hair, Lawrence would go back to blonde between films — but her second time doing so, things didn't go so well. "She wanted to go back to blonde for award season, but her hair had so much color build-up that she decided to cut it off to her shoulders," Catching Fire hair designer and head stylist, Linda Flowers, told Cosmopolitan.
"I tried to lift the brown pigments out of her hair twice with a base-breaking formula, which helped, but then Jennifer went to her personal colorist and spent eight hours there, bleaching it," Flowers said. "The entire process really damaged her hair, so that's when she went full pixie to get her hair back to a healthy state." After this, Lawrence wore a wig for the final two movies.
10.Kate Winslet initially loved the idea of going bright red for Titanic, but the hairstyle brought on a little more trouble than expected. “I hadn’t counted on how hard it would be to go back to my natural hair color after filming," she told Elle. "It took almost two years.”
11.Charlize Theron famously rocked a buzz cut for her iconic role as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. It wasn't that role that ruined her hair, but actually, the press tour she'd done prior. She said her hair had become "fried," and she suggested Furiosa have a shaved head. The last two projects she promoted before filming Mad Max were Snow White and the Huntsman and Prometheus, which she promoted around the same time (the two were released a week apart) — making them to blame for Theron's fried hair.
12. For his brief role on The Flash, Mark Hamill dyed his hair purple, for some reason opting for permanent dye. It was fun for a bit, but proved miserable — it took him three months and three dye jobs to get his hair back to blonde.
13.Pauley Perrette, who played Abby on NCIS, had to dye her naturally blonde hair black for years for the role. While there's no word on whether her hair itself was damaged, her health was — she dyed her hair so often that she developeda potentially fatal allergic reaction to the dye and was rushed to the ER.
14.Tricia Helfer dyed her hair bleach blonde for her role in Battlestar Galactica, but in the second season, they had to keep cutting it shorter to deal with how damaged her hair was becoming. "When we started the second season, every episode my hair gets thinner and thinner and thinner, and shorter and shorter and shorter," Helfer said. "And then finally it started falling out in chunks and they had to give me a wig."
15.Nikki Reed had a reallllyyyy bad experience dyeing her hair blonde for Twilight. “It took 36 hours initially to make me blond, and every other day, I was bleaching my head and my skin," she told MTV. Eventually, it got so bad that her hair started to fall out — so Reed, a natural brunette, opted to wear wigs for the rest of the series.
16.Milla Jovovich had to do the same thing for The Fifth Element. Keeping her orange-hued style with bright white roots required bleaching her hair constantly, leading to her hair falling out in clumps just a few weeks into shooting. She, too, had to switch to wigs. "We had to make the Leeloo wig because I literally had only, like, half...like, clumps of hair. It was really awful," she told Vogue.
17.Anna Paquin was contractually obligated to keep dyeing her hair blonde to play Sookie on True Blood. Answering what she didn't like about playing the character at Comic-Con in 2009, Paquin said she wished Sookie weren't blonde, claiming the constant dye jobs caused breakage that meant she couldn't grow her hair long. "I would be spending a lot less time in the hair salon getting my roots retouched, and my hair would probably be a little bit longer because it's gradually getting shorter as the ends break off because I'm a fake, fake, fake blonde," she told the crowd.
18.Carey Mulligan has become known for her short blonde pixie, but as it turned out, it wasn't her favorite. "I hate my hair," she said. "After An Education, I had a small part in Michael Mann's film Public Enemies, and he wanted me to dye it white blonde, and it wrecked my hair."
"Literally, ruined it. It was falling apart, fried. So, I had to cut it off. I cried," she revealed. "I got stuck with the short hair thing," she also later explained, rebutting comments from an interviewer that suggested she did it as a statement. "No! No statement. I loved having long hair."
19.And finally, this wasn't quite a role, but former Bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristowe said that filming the show was so stressful, that her hair actually started falling out. "I lost hair [throughout the season], like chunks!" she told Entertainment Tonight. "I had a bald spot at the back of my head from stress."
TLDR; Let's let actors use wigs next time, 'kay? Tell us your hair dye disasters in the comments!
