“Lucky” follows a young, female con artist who cuts and dyes her hair after a mission goes awry. When Anya Taylor-Joy arrived on set, she had beautiful, long white-blonde hair that harshly juxtaposed her character's on the run disguise. To create the illusion of her character’s chameleon-like appearance without compromising Taylor-Joy’s natural locks, the show’s head of hair, Jose Zamora, and Taylor-Joy’s personal hairstylist, Tess Natoli, worked closely with the actress to style a series of wigs. Together, Zamora and Natoli designed and styled three custom-made wigs that allowed Taylor-Joy to seamlessly transform her hair throughout the series: one red to represent her character’s natural color and two blonde, to cover the signature blunt bob.

From the get-go, Natoli and Zamora wanted Lucky’s hero wig to be “short with movement” to juxtapose her long red “before” hair. After cutting off the initial length, Natoli knew she could go shorter, and so she tweaked until reaching that perfect, perky length we see throughout the show. Natoli worked “backwards with the script” to develop Lucky’s initial hair color. “The strawberry blonde hair was the result of knowing we wanted to end up with a short blonde look,” Natoli shares with The Set Set. “I wanted the red wig to reflect Lucky's youth, so I kept it sleek, long, and straight.” For the younger version of Lucky, (played by Quinn Aune) Zamora dyed the actress’s hair in perfect accordance with the color of Taylor-Joy’s wig. After filming concluded, Aune stuck with red hair, much to Zamora’s delight. 

Natoli and Zamora collaborated with Los Angeles-based wig maker Justin Stanford to create Lucky’s hair. For Natoli, the most important quality of a wig is the quality of hair, direction of knotted hair, and the hairline. “I want a wig to look as real as possible, so even the crew assume it’s the actor’s own hair,” Natoli shares. Initially, Lucky’s signature blonde wig looked too good to go straight to screen, so Zamora tweaked the color in accordance to the character’s box dye roots. “Once you saw it on the monitor, it was almost too perfect of a blonde, so we had to kind of warm it, just add a pinch of yellow because that's what would happen if you try to beat your own hair,” Zamora explains. 

Lucky is a chameleon, forced by circumstance to read every room in an instant and adapt her appearance and demeanor, so Natoli’s accessory choices were informed by Lucky’s immediate surroundings. “I kept Lucky’s styles simple; she uses what she finds,” Natoli says. In episode two, when Lucky seeks refuge with a single mom of two young girls, Natoli uses the kid’s hair clips to hold Lucky’s hair out of the wounds. “Once Lucky showered, we reused the clips in a way that gave Lucky an innocent, childlike look so the girls related to her more, allowing Lucky to gain their trust,” Natoli said. When Lucky reaches her next environment—a wealthy suburbanite’s birthday party—she loses the hair clips for a more sophisticated, look that allows her seamlessly blend in with the moneyed guests.

Many scenes left Lucky’s blonde wig stained with blood, so Natoli had to find a fix that prevented the fake blood from staining. “I found using Dermashield mousse as a styling product was a game changer, the blood just washed out! I even used it in Anya’s own hair under the wig so there was no transfer of pigment leaving her with pink patches when we took the wig off at the end of the day,” Natoli says. In the hair trailer, Natoli styled Taylor-Joy’s wig wet, twisting individual sections in an alternate pattern and letting it dry naturally. 

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Throughout the series, Natoli used Lucky’s hair to reflect her interiority. “Once Lucky had lost the love of her life, I kept her hair flatter, almost dull to replicate her grief,” Natoli says. The hairstylist allowed natural frizz to “slowly creep in,” allowing her appearance to appear frazzled. Conversely, when Lucky finds the money and gets herself some new clothes in a later episode, Natoli makes her hair more defined and crisp, while “still keeping a natural shape and look to it.” 

In many cases, the show’s shooting environment did the work of creating the looks. When Lucky is walking through the desert after a gruesome car crash, her wig naturally accumulated sand and dirt that Natoli decided to leave in. “The wind out there was crazy, there were dust plumes across the landscape and Lucky was walking through them,” Natoli shares. “Her hair was blasted by wind and filled with dirt, it gave a texture and look that was truly realistic.” 

Zamora took a similar approach to letting the elements style Annete Benning’s natural hair for the character of Priscilla. “I hate when I'm watching something and trees are whipping around in the back and the hair is just stiff and it looks like a helmet. It just doesn't look natural to me,” Zamora says. So when it was his turn to style a character in the wind, he adopted a  “let it roll, let it be” attitude to the wind.