Deep in the labyrinth of Studio 8H—the longtime home of Saturday Night Live at 30 Rockefeller Center—actor Chloe Fineman sits in a chair with a wig cap on. “I call this the penis head,” she says, pointing to the stretchy, fleshy, nylon. “The amount of people I’ve met looking like this…Leonardo DiCaprio, Colin Farrell…” Beside her, Jodi Mancuso laughs as she places a blonde hairpiece evoking a 1950s housewife upon her head. “Chloe looks great in period wigs,” she says in a soft Bronx accent. “She wears the wig, the wig does not wear her.”
It’s the highest of praise from Mancuso, the longtime hair designer head at the live sketch comedy show. She knows the back of each cast member’s head like the back of her own hand: Their wig blocks—essentially, styrofoam versions of their skulls—line her hair room. Drawn in sharpie are their exact hairlines and ear placement.
Mancuso always had the sense that she was destined to do hair. Her uncle styled on Broadway, and her mother used to cut her friends’ hair in the kitchen. Despite being untrained, she was amazing at it. “We weirdly always had a knack for hair,” Mancuso says now.
After getting her GED at 16, Mancuso couldn’t afford to go to hair school, so for a while she groomed dogs instead. Then, one day, she got a call from her uncle: Could she join him on 42nd Street?
She spent the next several years handling the hair in shows like The King and I and Titanic: The Musical. After studying the shape of an actor’s head—the way their strands moved when they did—she’d create and style their wig to be as realistic as possible. “I just loved it,” she says. Then, in her 20s, she had children and took a break from the hair business. For a time, she and her husband ran a pizzeria together, but Mancuso was miserable. “After two years, I was like, ‘Oh God, I can t do this anymore. I have to go back to being a creative person.’ When you’re not being creative, you feel like you’re slowly dying,” she says now.
She called her friend who was still in the business. Did he have any hair she could do? Happily, he did: Saturday Night Live needed “Saturday people,” or extra hairdressers on hand to help during the live show. So on the weekends, Mancuso snuck out of the slice shop and into 30 Rock to style Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, and Amy Poehler. Twenty-three years—and eight Emmys for outstanding hairstyling for a variety, nonfiction, or reality program later—she’s still there.
Her work begins on Wednesday: She sits in on the table read with the cast as they pitch their sketch ideas to Lorne Michaels. Of the 14 that are chosen, nearly all of them involve wigs. Sometimes that’s because the actors are doing impressions of real-life people—take the recent episode with Ariana Grande, in which the host played both Jennifer Coolidge and Celine Dion. At other times they need to resemble archetype: Grande wore a period-appropriate bowl cut to play a Renaissance-era Italian castrato, and girlish pigtails as a pre-teen in the digital short “My Best Friend’s House.” And given most cast members are playing several roles, in quick succession, throughout the night, there’s often no time to fix their own hair between sketches. So, each actor also has a “self wig”: a wig meant to mimic their actual hair that they can throw on at any time. On average, each episode of Saturday Night Live features about 80 wigs; with 20 episodes per season, that means Mancuso oversees around 1,600 wigs over eight months. (To handle them all, Saturday Night Live runs its own wig shop, located a floor above Studio 8H.)
After the table read, Mancuso works with the writers to flesh out the vision for their characters. They can have a specific look in mind (easier) or nothing in mind at all (harder). “Oftentimes a sketch will be: ‘This guy has crazy hair,’” cast member Mikey Day says. “And, you know, she has to figure it out.” Needless to say, he adds, “She always delivers.”
Take the time she made an outrageous pair of wigs for Day’s “Beavis and Butt-Head” sketch, in which he and Ryan Gosling played guys who looked uncannily (and ridiculously) like the two cartoon characters. Or her work on Day, Streeter Seidell, and Bobby Moynihan’s first David S. Pumpkins skit with Tom Hanks: Mancuso studied photos of Hanks in his 20s to craft his wig for that, adding an orange curl. When he finally tried it on, she recalls, his reaction was: “I still don’t understand who this guy is, but this is hilarious.”
Her hardest wig? Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump, by far. The directionality, the spacing, the color—Trump’s strands can take on an almost translucent quality, so that whatever is behind him affects the hue of the hair. “You can’t really trust pictures a lot of time—color-wise,” Mancuso explains. So she cross-referenced pictures of him both inside and outside, besides closely studying videos.
She’ll stay at studio 8H until 2 a.m. on Wednesdays, monitoring the progress of each hairpiece in the shop. On Friday, the first wigs are used for pre-taped sketches, and on Saturday, it’s the final sprint to the Wiglympics: Mancuso oversees 21 other hair designers as they pop them on and off during the live show.
After a sketch is over, every wig is filed away. If it belongs to an active cast member, it goes into a drawer in Studio 8H’s hair room with their name on it. Then, a polaroid is taken and put into the actor’s wig binder. (The largest binder by far belongs to Kenan Thompson. Inside is an index of his wig-required characters: Martin Luther King, Jr., Maya Angelou, Mike Tyson, reads the Ms section.) If it is for a host—or if a cast member leaves—it’s filed into the “wig wall.” As its name suggests, the wig wall is an entire wall of storage cabinets in a hallway. They’re labeled by hair type: WBL (women’s blonde), MBR (men’s brown), and so on. Open a random one—as this writer did—and you may stumble upon Darrell Hammond’s Al Gore wig. (“Move to gray?” reads a note on the bag.)
Many of these archival wigs get restyled and repurposed season to season. Yet some become too iconic to change—say, Mike Myer’s Wayne, or Bill Hader’s Stefan, or Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer. Out of respect to the actors, they’ll never touch another head.
And maybe out of respect to us, too. On a Halloween Night in the West Village, I walked out of my building and onto the street. Hundreds of people were in costume, and as I turned a corner, I bumped into…David S. Pumpkins? “Excuse me,” he said, his orange curl bouncing as he went.
