Margot Robbie in I, TonyaPhoto: Backgrid; Courtesy of Clubhouse Pictures
If the recent award seasons have taught us anything, it's that you can't underestimate the chameleonic abilities of Hollywood's leading ladies—especially when it comes to an all important above-the-neck transformation. And this year's crop of Golden Globe nominees is no exception. Prosthetics! Shocking dye jobs! Uncharacteristically makeup-free faces! It's as if no performance was complete without catalyzing a double-take effect.
Last year, Emma Stone took home a Best Actress award looking very much herself in La La Land, but for Battle of the Sexes, she did a complete 180 degree turn as famed tennis legend Billie Jean King, trading in her signature auburn lengths for a dark shag, then teaming the style with a bare face and retro glasses nearly identical to what King wore to the ratings-smashing 1973 real life championship showdown.
A living icon well-versed in the art of an identity switch, Meryl Streep was similarly no nonsense with a smooth bouffant and rouge swirled on her famously sculpted cheekbones to play Katherine Graham, the country's first female newspaper publisher in director Steven Spielberg's critically acclaimed biopic, The Post. And while Michelle Williams traded in her platinum pixie for a swoopy strawberry blonde bob in All the Money in the World, Saoirse Ronan dyed her pale blonde bob acid pink with devil-may-care visible roots in coming-of-age story Lady Bird.
Those distinguished actresses—all of them previous nominees know for their ability to boldly shed their red carpet personas, not to mention their glamorous red carpet hair and makeup—didn't disappoint, but there was a certain added shock value for a number of newcomers that also inspired jaws to drop. As the matriarch of a poor farming family in Mudbound, Mary J. Blige—a real life R&B diva who is rarely seen without aspirational levels of polish—went seemingly stripped back and makeup free for the part. And then there was Margot Robbie's metamorphosis into professional ice skater and Olympian Tonya Harding in I, Tonya. "Our biggest obstacle was how classically beautiful Margot is," explains the film's makeup department head Deborah La Mia Denaver. But with prosthetics, reverse contouring, and several hours in the makeup chair, the Australian actress radically embodied the original '90s anti-hero. Here, the six makeovers (and unders) that will have Hollywood talking all awards season long.
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