Bringing the hairstyles of Fox to 'Bombshell' earned her an Oscar nomination
Though it is gauche to speak ill of the dead, the truth is that Roger Ailes had no imagination. The longtime Fox News chief had the most predictable of palates: He liked long legs, short skirts and blond hair. Specifically, a vivid blond that is relatively rare in the natural world: Only 2 percent of people on Earth really have blond hair.
Hairstylist Anne Morgan was tasked with re-creating the looks of some of Fox News’s most famous blondes for the movie “Bombshell,” which is based on the accounts of women at the network — among them Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) and Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) — who exposed how Ailes preyed on his female employees. In addition to those recognizable faces, Morgan also helped create the look of a fictional millennial comer, Kayla Pospisil, played by Margot Robbie. The results are almost eerie, like “Fox & Friends” meets “Black Mirror.” For this accomplishment, Morgan, alongside Kazu Hiro and Vivian Baker, has been nominated for an Academy Award for achievement in makeup and hairstyling.
The architect of the aesthetic that Morgan set out to reproduce — and the villain of “Bombshell” — is Ailes, who was chairman and chief executive of Fox News until he resigned under pressure in July 2016 after 25 women accused him of sexual harassment. (Burned but not blackballed, he moved on to advising Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.) He died in 2017 at age 77.
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Morgan’s initial sense of the look that Ailes created was straightforward: “It’s just overdone,” she says. But she soon came to believe that there was something more disturbing at work. “When you go down the rabbit hole, you see the sexuality that’s placed on them,” she says of the women she was helping to depict. “And we take it for granted that that was normal, that that’s not a big deal.” (Carlson and Kelly did not respond to requests for comment. Fox News has said that the network has changed since Ailes’s departure and the work environment depicted in the film doesn’t reflect its current one.)
For “Bombshell,” Kidman, Theron and Robbie all wore wigs, to which wefts (hair extensions) were added. Wigs for the movie cost about $7,000 to $10,000 a pop, with a few exceptions; the wig for the actor playing Geraldo Rivera cost just $800, though the front had to be rebuilt, adding $2,000 to the tab. “Labor makes up the bulk of that cost,” Morgan explains. “Each hair is hand-tied one by one.”
The whole process, from design to execution, “is best done with a six-week lead,” Morgan says, though sometimes the timelines are significantly tighter. Roger Ailes’s wife, Beth, is played by Connie Britton, who famously has “that gorgeous head of hair,” and Morgan and her team only had 48 hours to build “a conservative shoulder-length bob” that could fit Britton’s hairline.
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Of the three women at the center of the film, Morgan gave the most extreme styling to Robbie’s character, Kayla, who, after all, is fictional. “Kayla is this weather girl from Florida, a right-wing, Christian, youthful YouTuber,” Morgan says. She figured Kayla would get her style tips from influencers and Instagrammers, and that she’d be likely to hit up a Drybar for the occasional blowout. Morgan notes that she “loaded her up with 24” wefts; on top of that, Robbie wore three sets of false eyelashes, high heels and a white dress “so skintight Margot could barely walk.”
Share this articleShareWhile the movie focuses on the culture Ailes created at Fox, it’s also true that the network has been far from alone in paying attention to the smallest details of how its talent looks on-air. Former CNN White House correspondent Jessica Yellin told Oprah Magazine last year: “The thing about getting your shot at the White House and then getting a phone call to be ridiculed for your hair is real. The conversations I had to have about my hair were mind-bendingly strange and never ending. ... For me with my hair, it was always that it blows in the wind, and they’d point at someone’s hair that didn’t.”
Certain patterns reign across broadcast news in general, especially for women. A study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, which was published in 2018 and based on an analysis of hundreds of photos of broadcast journalists, found that 95.8 percent of female reporters and anchors had smooth hair, about two-thirds had short or medium-length styles, and nearly half were blond.
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While men appeared to both go gray and lose their hair, women — miraculously! — never did either. And though men on camera regularly appeared “pretty average-looking,” a disproportionate number of women were “super-attractive,” Mary Angela Bock, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of journalism, told me. “Across the board in television, there does seem to be a look that is favored for women that tends toward more youthful features and also features that we would associate with whiteness: smooth hair, narrow noses and other kinds of features that we would find in Caucasian women,” says Bock. “The sameness is troublesome.”
“I think what’s striking to me is, with all of the confidence that somehow women have made progress in the workplace, if you look at the way women appear on television today, they adhere more strictly to patriarchal expectations,” Bock explains. “What does a particular segment of the population think is attractive? It leaves a lot of people out, and it leaves a lot of women out, and I think that when I look at this study, it just makes me sad.”
Of her days spent thinking about the Fox look, Morgan has a similar takeaway: “It’s really crazy what we, as women, allow to tell our story,” she says. “Your hair is how you are perceived, [along with] your makeup, your shoe and dress choice. And it’s interesting how [at Fox] it was so curated by Roger Ailes, completely designed by him.” In the wake of the #MeToo movement, Morgan goes on, the idea that the “whole presentation” of female professionals would be “formed by a man, specifically somebody who was monitoring everything they did ... does that really feel very modern right now? No.”
Jessica M. Goldstein is a writer in Washington.
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