When you find a wig bad enough, you just gotta keep using it. That’s what the producers of Garry Marshall’s upcoming mom-stravaganza Mother’s Day must believe, because they’ve outfitted Julia Roberts with a truly awful red bob. And it’s not even a fresh red bob. It’s an old red bob — like, really old. Like old enough to drive a car.
Because it’s the same red bob wig that Roberts wore in 1999’s Notting Hill, which was not directed by Marshall but might as well have been. The news was confirmed by People. To clarify, Roberts’ Notting Hill character was an actor, and so wore many wigs inside of movie-in-movie films — maybe Mother’s Day takes place inside the world of that film, and her character was once an astronaut? No, that’d be too good. Anyway, also in People, Roberts elucidated on the whole vibe of her Woman Who Has It All character, saying, “There’s a lot of interpretation about my look. I wish I could’ve put that much thought into it. It was kind of, like, quick putting it together.”
Maybe that explains the use of an old wig, because the look was just so quickly put together? This is great insight into the way Hollywood outfits its stars, as apparently when a new film is announced, and an actress is cast, a wardrobe person is sent into the Wig Warehouse to select a wig off of the wig shelves, which are ever-growing in number but never wiped clean, and so decades and decades of film’s wigs find homes there, where they’re dusted and spritzed by eager production assistants, who, perhaps in a fit of nostalgic longing, sometimes place the wigs upon their heads and snap a quick selfie or two, maybe just for Snapchat, that medium’s ephemeral nature reassuring to the young film buff whose career is, at the moment, so fragile and at the whims of potentially angry producers.
Maybe that explains it. Or maybe Garry Marshall just really loves Notting Hill?