Jamie Lee Curtis is the kind of friend willing to share the wig off her head.
Specifically Curtis’ wig from “Halloween Ends,” which ended up on close friend Jennifer Grey’s head in the Lifetime movie “Gwen Shamblin: Starving for Salvation” (airing Saturday).
Grey rang Curtis for hair help when she was about to sign for the role as the big-haired and controversial leader of the Remnant Fellowship Church.
“I called (Curtis) and said, ‘Oh, there’s this job I’m thinking of doing, but I told them I need good wigs,'” Grey told Entertainment Weekly. “And she said, ‘Okay, I’m sending you a number right now. His name is Rob Pickens, and he did my wigs for ‘Halloween.’ And he did Ana de Armas’ wigs for ‘Blonde.’ He’s got a wig-making atelier where they make them by hand, hair by hair, and you’ve got to call him as soon as you get off the phone with me.'”
Grey said it didn’t even matter that she had not formally closed the deal for the role. Curtis told her: “I don’t care. It takes a long time. You need to get a wig fitting today.”
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Grey called and Pickens told her that Curtis’ wig from a flashback scene in “Halloween Ends” was perfect for the initial Shamblin wig. It was “repurposed.”
“So the first wig that I’m wearing (at the beginning of the movie), when Gwen is kind of like the church lady, that’s Jamie’s old wig from ‘Halloween Ends.'” said Grey.
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Pickens explained:
“The shorter wig repurposed for Gwen was a ‘flashback’ wig we built for Jamie used in ‘Halloween Ends.’ We adjusted the color and re-fronted to fit Jennifer’s measurements. They are dear friends, so it was very special they could wear the same wig.”
Gwen Shamblin’s controversial book “The Weigh Down Diet” (which encouraged worship as a replacement for mindless eating) was published in 1997. She and her church, founded in 1999, were the subjects of HBO Max’s docuseries “The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin.”
Before dying in a 2021 plane crash, Shamblin rose to megachurch fame and showed off more extreme hair, Pickens’ team created a bigger second wig to represent that higher hair look.
“My hair had to be slicked and tightly bound to my head, and clipped and gelled,” Grey said of the bigger wigs. “The wig was not uncomfortable, but the tightness under it (was). I have a lot of hair to wrap up inside a wig cap!”
When Grey showed off that Shamblin wig look in November on Instagram, she shook the internet.
“Ok….. you have my full attention,” commented Michael J. Fox.
“Saved by the Bell” alum Elizabeth Berkley Lauren said she was “dying to see” the feature.
Contributing: Erin Jensen
Story Credit: usatoday.com