11 Iconic Onscreen Hairstyles From Shows And Movies That Actually Turned Out To Be Wigs, Extensions, Or Dyed

June 11, 20255 Mins Read

1. Last year, Miley Cyrus revealed that she used to wear at least “250 individual hair extensions” at the request of her mom, Tish Cyrus, presumably when she starred on the Disney series Hannah Montana. “If it was under 250, my mom wasn’t having it. Tish would say, ‘We need another row!’” she shared on Harper’s Bazaar’s The Good Buy podcast.

Miley Cyrus with long wavy hair at an event — Dee Cercone/Everett Collection

2. Fellow ex-Disney star Ashley Tisdale wore extensions while filming part of the High School Musical franchise after her hair became “absolutely fried” from bleaching it. She told Cosmopolitan this year, “For the first High School Musical, I had been rehearsing for, like, two weeks, and you become the character during those rehearsals. I was light blonde, and they put in these lowlights. And I thought, Woah, this is not Sharpay. I ran to [director] Kenny Ortega and was like, ‘This isn’t right.’ He agreed, but we were supposed to film the next day. So we just bleached my hair, and it absolutely fried it. I have thick hair, so we had to put extensions up to the root to match the thickness, and people thought I was wearing wigs in the film.”

Ashley Tisdale in a scene from "HSM" — ©Disney Channel/Courtesy Everett Collection

3. Leighton Meester famously dyed her natural blonde hair dark when she played Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl.

Leighton Meester shooting "Gossip Girl" — James Devaney / WireImage

4. Rachel McAdams wore a $10,000 wig when playing Regina George in Mean Girls. Her costar Rajiv Surendra shared in 2016, “They had a wig made out of human hair by a very well-known wig maker from this little town called Stratford, Ontario. I don’t know if this is actually true, but I remember hearing something about Rachel not wanting to bleach all of her hair. So the front bit was bleach blonde, so that was her real hair, but the wig was fake. I remember walking in to the makeup and hair trailer regularly and seeing the wig being washed. They actually would wash it and put this little shower cap thing on it that they would hook the blow dryer onto that would dry the wig. It was like a $10,000 wig.”

Rachel McAdams as Regina George in "Mean Girls" — ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

5. Ariana Grande bleached and dyed her hair bright red regularly for years while playing Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon’s Victorious. She eventually started wearing a wig, writing in a Facebook post that her hair was “completely destroyed” as a result of the regular coloring.

Ariana Grande on the set of "Victorious" — Micah Smith / Getty Images

6. Sofía Vergara is a natural blonde, though she dyed her hair dark brown to help her book jobs in Hollywood early in her career. She shared last year, “The way that I looked was not the way that Hollywood really saw Latina women. They were expecting a more dark-haired woman. It was difficult because they were a little confused, like, ‘This woman sounds like a Latin woman but she’s blonde.’”

Sofia Vergara, blonde, at an event — Jim Smeal / Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

7. Naturally a brunette, Nikki Reed dyed her hair blonde to play Rosalie Hale in the Twilight series. “It took 36 hours initially to make me blonde, and every other day, I was bleaching my head and my skin,” she shared back in 2009, adding that she was “testing out different wigs” for the rest of the franchise.

Nikki Reed at an event — Dee Cercone/Everett Collection

8. In 2019, Zooey Deschanel recalled having to go blonde for the 2003 movie Elf. “I had to dye my hair blonde for a screen test for a movie that never happened before I did Elf,” she shared. “I went in for the meeting for Elf, and then I asked them, ‘Could I dye my hair back to my natural color?’ And they said, ‘No. You have to keep your hair [as] it was in the meeting.’ So, I had to wait until I was done with that movie. But as soon as I was done with that movie, I pretty much dyed it back.”

Zooey Deschanel in a scene from "Elf" — ©New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett Collection

9. Debby Ryan, who is a natural blonde, dyed her hair red while starring in the Disney Channel series Jessie — something that she described as “a lot of maintenance” during a 2014 Teen Vogue interview.

Debby Ryan in a scene from "Jessie" — Ron Tom / Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

10. Ashley Benson eventually wore a blonde wig on Pretty Little Liars after bleaching her hair so much that it fell out. “I bleached my hair so much during Season 3, and it fell right off, and you couldn’t even tell. I got a call from Warner Bros. like, ‘You need to do something with your hair.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, duh, I’m bald!’ Bleaching my hair was my biggest regret,” she told Elle in 2018.

Ashley Benson in a "Pretty Little Liars" scene — ©ABC Family/courtesy Everett Collection / ©ABC Family/Courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection

11. Finally, Keira Knightley has talked openly about wearing wigs in movies after her hair became super damaged from constantly dying it. “It got so bad that my hair literally began to fall out of my head. So for the past five years I’ve used wigs, which is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to my hair,” she shared in 2018.