Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529095
THE ARTISAN WINTER 2025 • 55 Getting the opportunity to work with Richard Linklater was a dream come true—he is one of my favorite filmmakers and he has made so many iconic movies from Dazed and Confused to Boyhood and School of Rock. It was a surreal experience having my first meeting with him! And then being able to create all these fun and vastly different looks on Glen Powell was the icing on the cake! is script is so fun sexy and cool I was beyond excited! It was a hair stylist's dream—so many different looks and ways to be creative! It was evident that there was going to be a lot of opportunity to push some boundaries with the Hit Man personas but real challenge was going to need creating a world where Glen's main character, Gary Johnson, and hit man Ron's hair could exist together as we would be going back-and-forth between them, so I couldn't change the haircut but I really wanted to give us that Clark Kent/Superman moment. Glen, Rick and I talked a lot during prep about who these people are. I like to think about it from several different angles when we're creating looks for a film like this: Where is this person in their life, where did they get their haircut? What kind of time do they spend doing their hair on a daily basis? What makes sense with who they are? I am always trying to keep things as real as possible, and as far as Gary Johnson's hit man transformations, these all had to be things that were feasible that he could do himself by watching a YouTube video, but they also needed to look realistic like somebody who could really exist in the world when they were going to meet potential clients, so it was a fine line to balance and it was a super fun challenge!! Gary is a bird-watching college professor while Ron is a sexy dangerous hit man. Aer speaking with Glen, we decided that Gary is very practical a 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner type of guy who parts his hair with the same comb in the same place every day. We wanted an almost shapeless haircut with no product. Gary is someone who wants to draw no attention to himself. On the other hand, Ron is giving effortlessly sexy bad boy vibes aer talking with Juliana Hoffpauir about the Ron wardrobe. I had a clear vision, tousled hair with texture worn back off the face but not slicked back. I wanted to be touchable and have movement—Robert Redford-Brad Pitt-Paul Newman energy—I used Tecuane Esperanza tonic and California Born hair days of dirt to prep Glen's hair and finger dried it with a Dyson blow dryer to set the shape and finished with California Born Surf Spray for texture. During the shoot. we switched between these two looks a lot, so it was important to have two dramatically different looks but also something that I could easily work between as we were on a tight shooting schedule. Now for the fun—Meet your hit men! Working with Tara Cooper, our Department Head Make-up, and costume designer Juliana Hoffpauir bringing these hit man characters to life was so fun, Tara had been working on her character renderings so, it was so fun for all of us to collaborate together and see the final looks on Glen! I used four different wigs that I cut and colored and made two different sets of extensions for the disguises. It was important that these all looked like actual people that could exist in the world but also sell the hit man fantasy. We wanted to show a progression in Gary's skill level from the first time we see him going undercover simply changing his hair to a middle part to getting into more elaborate PHOTOS COURTESY OF NETFLIX IT'S A HIT, MAN B Y A L L Y V I C K E R S D E P A R T M E N T H E A D H A I R