My wardrobe on Up in the Air was perfectly curated for my character. But it felt so unnatural to me, as did the rest of my look—the hair and the makeup—that I started to feel claustrophobic in it as the weeks went on. I bought some glittery nail polish in an alarming shade of blue and painted my toes so that I could be in control of one small corner of my body. Natalie would never wear something so juvenile, but I liked knowing that under my perfectly tailored skirt suit, I was still messy and strange.
My tiny act of rebellion was discovered on the day we shot a scene at airport security. I had counted on Natalie always wearing closed-toed shoes, but even in movie-land, the TSA is unflinchingly scrupulous. I pulled at the toes of my nude stockings until enough material gathered to obscure my sparkling nails. Our costume designer, Danny Glicker, as acerbic as he is brilliant, looked me up and down and raised his eyebrow. Your secret’s safe with me, but that’s an unfortunate look. No one else on set seemed to notice. That scene was cut anyway. Perhaps test audiences were thrown by how guilty Natalie looked during a simple airport security check.
Keeping Up Appearances
When you start a new film, you come to work looking nice for the first week. Then, inevitably, you remember that you are in your personal clothes for thirty minutes each morning and your costume for the next fifteen hours. All right! Same pair of sweatpants every day for a month, here I come! By week three, if an actor is still coming to work in a full outfit at four a.m., you can be sure that they’re banging someone on set.
The same is true for your appearance from the neck up. You show up looking like hell on toast and, lucky for you, some poor sap has to put your face and hair into some recognizably human arrangement before the first shot.
I’ve been told I have “working-girl hair.” I like this expression because it sounds like my hair is a swarthy, streetwise prostitute in 1930s New York. It’s actually a reference to the damage your hair goes through when you are on a film set. The more movies you make, the worse the damage from blow-drying, curling, coloring, etc. In this sense the term is supposed to be worn as a badge of honor, a testament to your work ethic—like calling your dark under-eye bags “success circles” or “ambition sacs.” What it actually means is that your hair is wiry and brittle with thin ends, and will need even more blow-drying, curling, and coloring to be made camera-ready.
I had very curly hair when I was growing up, but I WILLED IT AWAY and now my hair dries naturally into gentle waves. (I heat-style my hair every single day so I don’t look like Dale Dickey in Winter’s Bone.) I used Frizz Ease for years until my first on-set hairstylist pointed out that the frizzy “before” picture was just a straight-haired model who’d been photographed with “messy” hair through some contrivance. I’m sure the look was achieved with a crimping iron and some back-combing, but I felt so betrayed that I liked to imagine the model had run afoul of a rabid squirrel.
In the hair and makeup trailer on my second film, rumors started to swirl about miracle flatirons from Japan. Previous generations of flatirons made your hair less curly yet somehow bigger and angrier, but not these. They were smaller, they were hotter, they’d transform you into the Amanda Bynes silk-nymph you’d always wanted to be (think What a Girl Wants, not mug shot). The cost of becoming this new woman? Almost two hundred dollars. (Straight-haired women, don’t you judge me! Cheap curling irons are completely fine, but flatirons don’t work like that!) The hair department bought one, and I used it on the days I had the energy for the Sisyphean task of straightening my hair, one inch at a time, knowing the process would begin anew upon the next wash. I had to get one for myself. I had no money, but you bet your ass I put that bad boy on a credit card. I couldn’t go back to being Book Hermione when I’d had a taste of being Movie Hermione. If that reference went over your head: In the books, Hermione is supposed to be ugly. In the movies, she’s Emma Watson. Also, in the book she fixes herself with magic. So nothing is fair.