‘The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey’ hairstylist Camille Friend on showing the mental state of a man ‘trying to right his wrongs’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“I’ve been working with Sam a long, long time. So this has been one of his pet projects. I mean, I think we started talking about this back in the ‘Django’ days, or even before,” says Samuel L. Jackson‘s hairstylist Camille Friend about their preparations for the Apple TV+ limited series “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey.” “We just talked about, well maybe we could do this or maybe we could do that. So all the maybes just happened to come together.” Watch our exclusive video interview with Friend above.
“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” tells the story of the title character, played by Jackson. Ptolemy is a man in his 90s who suffers from advanced dementia but gets the chance to regain his memories through an experimental treatment. So the role required Jackson not only to be aged about 20 years, but also to change appearance to reflect his evolving mental condition and ability to care for himself. Friend and makeup artist Jake Garber started by looking up photographs to inform Ptolemy’s look. The key was “finding that middle balance” of a man who has been neglected by much of his family but not entirely abandoned.
“Basically we had four hair pieces,” Friend explains about the different looks required for the series. His “hero look” is the one we see most often with his “big fro” that was “a little thinning in here and a little thinning in there just to give you the overall look” of a man living alone with limited support. When his memories return he has a polished, “cleaned-up” look. For flashbacks that have to de-age Jackson, Friend was inspired by 1970s-era Jim Brown. And later in the series when Ptolemy has to appear at his most disheveled, Jackson and Friend actually disagreed on the approach. “So we ended up making two wigs” to decide which would work better — which actually convinced Friend that Jackson was right. “We just wanted to give him an arc where you could really see what happens to Ptolemy and him just trying to right his wrongs.”
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