Batman has his utility belt, Wonder Woman her lasso, and Cassie, played by Carey Mulligan in Focus Features’s Promising Young Woman, has her messy makeup. When the former med student goes on nighttime hunts to trap predatory men who would otherwise prey on vulnerable women, her weapons are a feigned drunken stagger, rumpled blond hair, and some carefully smeared lipstick. For hairstylist Daniel Curet and makeup artist Angie Wells, the task was to work against Hollywood conventions and make the glamorous Mulligan look like a true mess.
The most visible change might be the enormous blond hair extensions, which Cassie styles into a sloppy bun or a slicked-back ponytail, depending on which vulnerable female stereotype she’s playing that night. Curet says Mulligan’s tousled look was inspired both by French icon Brigitte Bardot and conversations with the film’s glam director, Emerald Fennell, who also cameos as a beauty vlogger.
Like many cinematic vigilantes, Cassie has a day job, working at a coffee shop where she looks sweet and girlish, with Wells’s soft makeup and Curet’s “childish hair ornaments.” But as things take a darker turn at the end of the film, Cassie’s final look evokes a different comic book figure. Going undercover as a stripper at a bachelor party, Cassie puts on a skintight nurse’s uniform and a rainbow-hued wig that Curet built from two separate hairpieces. Wells gave Mulligan a “living blow-up doll” look with oversize lips and eyes, while the actor herself requested a shorter hairstyle. After a few attempts, Curet says, he “finally took paper scissors” to hack away at the plastic wig. The look—alluring but sinister, righteous but misguided—is what he calls “her version of the Joker.”
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