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The pandemic makeover story may be well-worn territory at this point, but the idea that physical transformation can offer a sense of control amid ongoing uncertainties has lost none of its shine. “With being in and out of lockdown for two years, and everyone either having a terrible time or a really boring time, people are looking for a change,” says Nicola Clarke, the legendary London hair colorist who has become something of a master at reinvention by way of bleach and developer while keeping Kate Moss’s roots in check.
Still, a recent call from Hari Nef was a little outside of Clarke’s usual purview—not least because of the military-level planning it took to get the model and actor into her Fitzrovia salon. Currently in the U.K. filming Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Barbie, a live-action film centered around the classic toy, which marks her big-budget studio-movie debut, Nef needed all of the big-budget clearances to change her long brunette strands midway through filming. But with an on-set wig as her witness—and a handful of reference photos celebrating Karen Elson’s first bloom as a ’90s-era Meisel muse—arrangements were made for a fiery red fresh start via a drastic pageboy bob and blunt fringe in the most sought-after hair color of the season.
On a recent afternoon at a photo studio in East London, Nef is recounting the lengthy lifting and lightening process that allowed Clarke to administer the color, which has been interpreted by everyone from Kendall Jenner to FKA Twigs as fashion’s unstoppable Y2K revival rages on. “This hair transformation is kind of a radical bid that I could make to my own body and my own appearance at this moment,” Nef explains of the copper-toned cinnamon gloss Clarke custom-mixed for her. Surely, I ask, this kind of involved process signals a long-term commitment? Nef demurs. “I’ll keep it for as long as it feels like me,” the 29-year-old says, smiling. “I don’t have an agenda.”
Nef has never really had an agenda. Initially honing her acting skills as a theater major at Columbia University in New York, she became something of an It girl for her eclectic style that mixed vintage Helmut Lang and Eckhaus Latta with plenty of Hood by Air’s deconstructed sportswear. By 2015, Nef was hosting club nights and regularly turning up at fashion parties when she was signed by IMG, making her the first transgender model to be represented worldwide by the talent agency; within the same week, she was cast in the second season of Joey Soloway’s Transparent, having been discovered by Soloway’s sibling years before as a teenager at an arts camp. “I went from graduation to the Emmys in four months,” Nef recalls of the head-spinning experience, which was punctuated by a Gucci runway turn the following year. “The question was: What happens after that?”
Nef moved to Hollywood, but her acting career drifted. “I had to figure some things out and get my life right. I had tried on so many looks, and friend groups, and hair colors, and pronouns,” she says. “I wanted to put some distance between me and the chrysalis.” While a starring role in 2018’s Assassination Nation, Sam Levinson’s pre-Euphoria high school action-comedy, didn’t provide the traction its buzzy breakout at Sundance promised, appearances on the TV show You and in Ondi Timoner’s biopic, Mapplethorpe, followed. Just as the pandemic hit in 2020, Nef moved back to New York, where she made a decision to prioritize friends and family, which she credits for her newfound self-possession. “That got me so healthy and happy that I think it winds up in the audition tapes somehow,” she says. After going for the role of Carrie’s book editor in the Sex and the City reboot, a part was written specifically for Nef to play the delightful Rabbi Jen, who memorably orchestrates a “they mitzvah” for Charlotte’s nonbinary child. “That was just the dream beyond the dream,” says Nef, who is a fully paid-up scholar of the SATC universe. (She later quotes one of Carrie’s musings about Mr. Big’s ex, Natasha, to describe her current costar Margot Robbie: “Some women are simply better!”)
“I saw Hari’s audition tape for Barbie and just flipped out,” Gerwig says. “I ran into the producer’s office with a computer and pressed play and said, ‘That is it. That is our movie.’ She had a joyfulness and playfulness and twinkling intelligent humor, which was exactly the tone. Knowing but not snarky, buoyant but not vapid.” Working on the project has been illuminating for Nef—not just because of her admiration for Gerwig, who she describes as an important architect of what we now know as the “complex female character,” but because of the personal nature of the subject matter. “Barbies were provided for me willingly by a mother who understood me,” she says, reminiscing on the pivotal role the hyper-feminized dolls played for her growing up as a queer kid in the suburbs of Boston. “But I still knew when we were at Toys ‘R’ Us that I was doing something a little odd,” she continues, describing the historically regressive perceptions around gender that are only now beginning to meet Nef where she has been all along. “It feels as though the business is finally catching up to her,” suggests Lena Dunham, a close friend of Nef’s for the better part of the last decade. (Also in the pipeline for Nef is a role in Levinson’s hotly-anticipated A24 and HBO show The Idol, for which she’s keeping the hair.)
In October, Nef will turn 30, a threshold that seems to hold a kind of cosmic significance. “Ah, my 20s,” she says with a winking, exaggerated sigh. “In so many ways, I’ve just come back to where I started—but with a lot more self-esteem.” In the meantime, she says, her flame-colored hair will serve as a beacon to keep moving forward. “I’m still experimenting and figuring it out, but I know what I don’t want now, which takes the pressure off,” she says, before adding: “I’m just ready to have fun.”
In this story: hair, Neil Moodie; makeup, Lisa Eldridge.