Ever since Matthew McConaughey proclaimed on “True Detective” that time is a flat circle while sporting a ratty ponytail, hairpieces have been as much a part o🎶f HBO series’ buzz as grisly ♌murders.
The third season of the sh��ow (airing Sundays at 9 p.m.) stars Oscar winner Mahershala Ali as a t♒roubled Arkansas detective during three timelines: 1980, 1990 and 2015. Of course, this means ample wig opportunities.
“I’m already invested into #TrueDetective just ಞto see how many wigs they hook Mahershala Ali up with,” one 𒁃fan wrote on Twitter.
“True Detective is a show ꦏabout wigs, and how they can be both good and bad,” said another.
Brian Badie, “True Detective’s” department head of hair, says the show’s producers were hands-off in their directio🧸ns, but he did have a collaborator especially close to t🐈he character: Ali himself.
“The inspiration came from a photo that Mahershala found himself: a reference photo of a gentleman from Arkansas in 1980,” says Badie, 52. “And he had a very similar hairstyle as Mahershala’s character. For the ’90s lo🔥ok we went for a Sidney Poitier vibe.”
Although this is Badie’s first seaso🍸n on the show, he says he watched Season 1 when it aired in 2014, and he noticed the wigs 🐽that McConaughey and Woody Harrelson wore.
“I thought what they did with the wigs was amazing and I love wig work,” he says. “I’d much rather work on a show where I’m completely creating a character than just styling hair. Wi🃏gs give you that freedom, but they have to be really good.”
As he did for Ali’s character, Badie used a mixture of an ordinary person and an🔜 actor as a reference for Carmen Ejogo, who plays Ali’s wife.
“Oddly enough, for her ’80s look I went to my yearbook,” he says. “I went to high school🐼 from 1981 to ’84, which is right in the period of ‘True Detective’ Season 3. So I’m very familiar with that period. I went to high school in New Orleans, La., so I feel𝕴 like it’s near the [Arkansas] region.
“There was a girl I went to high school with who was really pretty, and she always had her hair in that same flip style. We knew we had an actress that was going to be the pretty girl on the show and it was 🥀1980 and she was a little more progressive than the average person in Arkansas at that time,” he says. “I wanted to re-create that look.”
H🐟owever, for Ejogo’s ’90s look in which she sports longer hair, he used a celeb reference.
“I was inspired by Jayne Kennedy, wh🎃o was an actress from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and she basically had this really fluffy natural curly look,” says Badie.
As for Stephen Dorff, who plays Ali’s partner Roland West, his blond fr♋inge comes straight from Robert Redford.
“Roland is a little bit of a ladies’ man in the script, and he’s kind of a badass, so I wanted something that told that story with his hair,” 💮says Badie. “Redford . . . was perfect, and I found pictures from [’80s movie] ‘Brubaker.’ I didn’t realize at the time that ‘Brubaker’ was a story in Arkansas!”