Emma, JLaw, Kelly Osbourne… Celebs Have Bad Hair Days Too

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Celebrities often decry losing their privacy, but there’s another loss that comes with fame that’s as restrictive: not being able to cut your hair.
 
As actors become known for a certain character, such as Game of Thrones Jon Snow or Friends Rachel Green, they are often contractually obligated to keep their hair the way the character does.

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Kit Harington, the actor who plays Snow, recently told British GQ that he can’t cut the dark, chin-length style that is so tied to his role. “I’m more recognizable in public than much better-known actors,” he told the magazine. “So many people watch, and I go around looking like my character.”

Or try to imagine Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss without her side plait in The Hunger Games. Lawrence did in 2013, telling Empire Magazine, “I am so bored with her braid. I keep asking, ‘Can’t I just wear my hair differently?’ But they keep saying no.”

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The actress, who you may have seen on the red carpet recently with a blond pixie cut, is actually wearing a wig in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. After she lopped off her hair, she quickly reassured fans that Katniss wouldn’t be going short too.
 
"This isn’t how Katniss is going to look in the next movies," the actress said during a Yahoo chat. "I’m actually wearing a wig (in the films)."

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Another classic franchise hairstyle—Taylor Lautner’s werewolf mane in Twilight—was also a fake, one the actor hated. “The wig, it was a very important co-star. Right now I’m not missing much,” Lautner told MTV. “There was hatred between both of us. It did not like me, I did not like it. Not fond memories.”

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Aniston, too, has repeatedly said how much she hated the choppy quintessential 90’s “Rachel” cut. This month on “The Graham Norton Show” she said that her longtime hairdresser, Chris McMillan, was stoned when he cut it. “He was loaded when he gave me the haircut,” she said. “Stoned out of his mind, which is true, and he didn’t think about, ‘Oh, she’s going to have to do this herself. Look, I’m having a great time being creative with this blow dryer.’ And then he leaves me with a round brush and a hair dryer. I don’t know how to make it look like that!”

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Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser might have been asked to deal with worse hair hell, though. The actor was asked to shave in a receding hairline to age his character for the fifth season of the AMC show—a look the 35 year-old has to wear off screen.

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Sometimes if stars aren’t even playing a fictional character, they’re obligated to keep their hair the same style or, in Kelly Osbourne’s case, color. The television personality has to maintain her purple shade for her gig on E!’s Fashion Police. ”I’m contracted to this hair color… I can’t change it for two years. I wanted to go green, but was told I wouldn’t be able to work anymore,” she said at Lucky’s FABB conference.

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It makes sense then, after having the same style for years, that some stars race to the hairstylist as soon as they’re allowed. After Gossip Girl concluded, Leighton Meester got rid of Blair Waldorf’s tumbling strands, a style she hadn’t been able to change for six years. “My long, wavy hair got a lot of mileage, so it was time for a change,” she said to Just Jared.

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Emma Watson did the same when she was finished playing Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger. “I didn’t get to experiment with dyeing and chopping off my hair like most teenagers,” she told Metro. “I also felt, right, I’m 20, I’m not a little girl any more. I’d been on Harry Potter for ten years so I needed to mark the end of it in some way. I needed a drastic change and that’s what the crop was all about.”

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Only in the rarest cases have stars been lucky enough have had their personal hair changes written into their shows. Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting got a pixie cut for a movie she was filming, and even though she offered to wear extensions on The Big Bang Theory, the writers decided her character should have a cut too. “They were great about it and they said, ‘I think it will be a great change for Penny and the show,’” she told EW.com. “They were really cool about it and on my side.”