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“I woke up like this,” Beyoncé announces on her 2013 song “Flawless.” But for Black Hollywood actresses like Vivica A. Fox, Tiffany Haddish and Gabrielle Union, looking camera-ready when the director yells “Action!” can require more than eight hours of sound, uninterrupted sleep.
They also welcome hair and makeup artists who know how to work with Black hair and Black skin and accentuate Black beauty.
Fox, 60, Haddish, 45, and Union, 52, discuss their beauty requirements and what happens when they aren’t met on set in Apple TV+’s new two-episode documentary Number One on the Call Sheet. The second episode, “Black Leading Women in Hollywood,” focuses on the unique hurdles Black actresses face, including stereotypes, a dearth of stand-out leading roles and a lack of hair and beauty essentials on the set.
“Back in the day, I fought for us to make sure that we had African-American makeup artists and hairdressers that understood our hair,” Fox says in the documentary. “That’s been a journey. When we were doing Independence Day, the lady who did my hair wanted this brown with blonde highlights in it. Because my own natural hair is very dark.”
“So she dyed my hair,” Fox continues. “She was like, ‘I want you to have all of these heroic moments with the wind and the hair, and my hair was almost dead by the time we was over. So they would say, ‘Oh, I can do Black hair.’ Child, they couldn’t do Black hair.”
Union, whose first screen credits included 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That and Bring It On, which were all led by White actors, had a more traumatizing experience on a film at the start of her career.
“One of my first jobs, the lady had a comb and a blow dryer with the heat up too much, where literally a chunk of my hair snapped off,” she recalls in the documentary. “And had the balls to use sky blue eye shadow and this dusty pink lipstick. I looked nuts.”
Haddish, who became a breakout star with the 2017 comedy Girls Trip, didn’t feel “safe” on a Hollywood set until she did Girls Trip.
“And when they have you here looking like Casper the friendly dead ghost, like, ‘Can you put something on a bitch that makes sense?’ ” she says of some of her less-thrilling experiences in the hair and makeup chair. “Now I’m having flashbacks. They got me having flashbacks.”
“When I did Girls Trip, that was the first time I worked on a project where all the hair and all the makeup knew how to do our type of hair, our skin tone,” she adds. “And it was amazing. ‘Cause I felt safe. It was the first time I felt safe on a project. And once I felt that kind of safety, it’s kind of hard to go somewhere else and not have that.”
Episode 2 of Number One on the Call Sheet, directed by Shola Lynch, also features interviews with Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, Cynthia Erivo, Nia Long, Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, Meagan Good, Jurnee Smollett, Taraji P. Henson, Gabourey Sidibe, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer.
Number One on the Call Sheet is streaming now on Apple TV+.
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