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In The Scenario, reporter Kirbie Johnson takes readers behind the scenes of the buzziest movies and TV shows to reveal how the best wigs, special effects makeup, and more are created. For this edition, Johnson spoke with Sarah Hindsgaul and Eryn Krueger Mekash, the hair designer and makeup department head for season five of Stranger Things. As you might guess, spoilers ahead.
Stranger Things has come to an epic conclusion after five seasons, 10 years of filming, and countless hairstyles. In 2022, this very column was created because of the show: after watching season four, I developed an obsession with Millie Bobby Brown’s hair. She’d shaved her hair to play Eleven in the past, but at the time she’d been spotted in public without the character’s signature buzz cut. I had to know: Did she shave it again for filming, or was the buzz cut now a wig?
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that it was, after all, an incredible single-knot wig (read: very tedious, laborious, and expensive. You can read all about it here.) Brown couldn’t shave her head while juggling roles in other projects.
Because Eleven grew her hair out (again) after season four, Brown didn’t had to don a faux shaved head on the set of season five—but there were plenty more wigs where that came from. “I got the bill and was like, ‘Can anybody use that much money on hair?’” jokes Sarah Hindsgaul, the show’s longtime hairstylist. She says that the hair team wound up repurposing wigs from seasons past because they had amassed so many of them. “When you see Karen Wheeler at the end [of the series], I think that's a season three wig that was cut up,” she says.
Read on to learn about the inspiration behind the most memorable character transformations in Stranger Things season five and the stories behind them.
Eleven's “Superhero” Hair
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Eleven is first introduced to us in season one as a child with her signature buzz cut, a result of being a test subject of MKUltra. The slickback bun she wears in season five is an homage to that look. “I wanted a lot of [the characters] to come full circle,” Hindsgaul says. “The reason Millie's hair is so slick when she's doing the final battles is that we wanted to be able to intercut from season one. I wanted to have a super clean silhouette on her.” She explains that Eleven is comfortable with short hair because she grew up that way and that, for her, there’s a feeling of safety in having her hair pulled back.
Hindsgaul didn’t want Eleven’s hair to detract from the story, either. Now that Eleven’s has long hair, they could have made the decision to have it free-flowing and thrashing during battle scenes, but that didn’t make sense for the character. “[For her training scenes], we needed flyaways, and we needed grit because she needed to feel like any one of us. You would have sweat, tears, and your hair would get messed up,” she says. “Then when she starts going into the tank, I think she has made up her mind [about her fate], and she's slicking everything down. We have seen her do that many times over the series, where she suddenly gets rid of all femininity and she becomes, basically, a superhero.”
Hindsgaul says it was “hardcore” for Brown to have a slickback bun, given she was in a wetsuit for most of the series and didn’t have anything to hide behind. For an actor, that means you have to be cognizant of every seemingly minuscule element of your performance, like posture. “But if anybody can pull that off, it's Millie,” she says. “There's such an honesty in that look. She's not hiding.”
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
This allusion to Eleven’s shorter, cropped hair then gave Hindsgaul a springboard to creating the character’s final look, where it’s imagined (or believed, if you will) that she’s alive with long, flowing hair. “We could finally give her the hair that we want her to have,” she says. “We’re longing to see her happy, feminine, living—enjoying life. But you can't have that when she's in the middle of a battle.”
Max's Disney Princess Moment
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Sadie Sink’s Max had been in a coma since season four, leaving her red hair to grow long like a weed. However, in real life, Sink has been wearing her hair cropped short, making wigs a necessity for Max’s look. “I think that was my favorite hair from this season, just because she has beautiful hair and I've always downplayed it to make her look more plain than [Sadie] really is. It would look like a L’Orèal commercial if I didn't tone it down,” Hindsgaul says. For this season, though, “I wanted it to be large, but I wanted to make sure that it was gritty enough to fit the show.”
A wig was applied behind Sink’s natural hairline so they could add length and texture—even if her hair had been long enough, it would have been hell on Sink’s natural hair to have teased it each day. Hindsgaul said Max required the most wigs (and therefore the highest hair budget) given that her hair had to be long and braided in some scenes and voluminous and frizzy in others.
Sadie Sink behind the scenes of season five.
Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Hindsgaul
Sadie Sink behind the scenes of season five.
Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Hindsgaul
In order to get the hair texture and color perfect, Hindsgaul always asks the actors to cut off a piece of their hair from their undermost layers so she can compare them to hair samples for wigs. “It's a lot to ask—it has to be fairly thick,” she explains. “That way, we can see how curly it is, because [the actors’] hair keeps changing. They're young people. They have a lot of hormones, so their curl patterns change constantly. It had to be a perfect color match.”
Karen Wheeler Takes Hair Cues from Nancy
STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 5. : Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
One way you can tell which trends have reached Hawkins, Indiana, is to watch Karen Wheeler’s evolution—she’s the tell of where the sleepy town is at culturally. In 1983, when the first season was set, her hair was dark and still had ‘70s layers. By season five, in 1987, her hair is bleached and permed, and she ends with a shorter cut that looks similar to her daughter Nancy’s [played by Natalia Dyer]. Typically, Nancy mimics her mother’s hair, but Hindsgaul says Karen, played by Cara Buono, took a note from her daughter instead for the time jump. As Hindsgaul recalls, “I sent this one photo to [Dyer] that I really liked of this woman with blonde, shorter hair, and she was like, ‘That's it. This is where I think I'm going.’ Five minutes later, Cara sent me the same photo and said, ‘This is where I'm going.’”
Karen’s aesthetic shift is a direct indication that she’s had enough of being the picture-perfect mom and wife. “She served the chicken, she did the rollers, she was ready every time [her husband] woke up. Then she's like, ‘Wait, maybe my daughter is on to something,’” Hindsgaul says. “There's an empowerment that happened inside Karen. She wanted to look good for men in many ways. Cutting your hair off is something you do for yourself.”
For the time jump, Nancy’s wore hair influenced by the soft, short haircut Julia Roberts wore at the 1991 Golden Globe Awards; Princess Diana was the reference for Karen, just with the hair swooping upward in the front versus down a la Lady Di. Season five’s makeup department head Eryn Krueger Mekash notes that Karen’s makeup look also took inspiration from Julia Roberts in a unique way. “[Karen’s] look was going off of the shopkeepers from Pretty Woman, where the inspiration was very bronzy and put together,” Mekash says. “Karen's back in her true form; what makes her happy is being fashionable.”
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Karen finally gets her own superhero moment this season—fighting a demogorgon in a nightgown, in the kitchen, with a broken wine bottle. She suffers some pretty intense wounds, achieved with silicone prosthetics created by prosthetic co-department heads Barrie Gower and Mike Mekash (editor’s note: Eryn’s husband!), which Mekash says took two and a half hours and two–to-three artists to apply to Buono, who lied on a massage table during the process.
You also see the aftermath of those wounds at graduation, where Karen showcases her battle scars proudly. “I've gotten so much feedback, in a good way, about Karen showing her scars at the end,” Mekash says. “People were very emotional about seeing her scars and how she was living her life with these horrible injuries that she'd recovered from, but she was still putting herself together and facing the world. Cara [Buono] really, really wanted to do that. She told Amy Parris, the costume designer, ‘We want [the wardrobe] open so we can see it all, and for her hair to be off her shoulders, so you could see all of her scarring.”
Steve's Top Gun Moment
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Steve Harrington lived! Thank god. And to the thrill of many fans, he ends the series as a gym teacher (who also teaches sex ed) and still keeps up with Dustin. Out of all the older kids in the series, Steve’s look changed the least over the seasons, and that’s because it didn’t need to.
Joe Keery behind the scenes of season five.
Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Hindsgaul
Joe Keery behind the scenes of season five.
Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Hindsgaul
“This is probably the unpopular thing to say, but he’s the only one that knows exactly who he is. He's not changing anything. But he's also not a teenager anymore, so there's no ‘jazz’ going on,” Hindsgaul says. “There's nothing to impress. It’s a lot like Tom Cruise: clean, blue-collar kind of situation.” Unlike many of his castmates, actor Joe Keery didn’t have to don a wig for the entire series until the time jump—yes, his hair really is that voluminous.
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