Inside the Hair-Raising World of ‘Saturday Night Live‘’s Wig Department

Deep in the labyrinth of Studio 8H—the longtime home of Saturday Night Live at 30 Rockefeller Center—actor Chloe Fineman sits in a chair with a wig cap on. “I call this the penis head,” she says, pointing to the stretchy, fleshy, nylon. “The amount of people I’ve met looking like this…Leonardo DiCaprio, Colin Farrell…” Beside her, Jodi Mancuso laughs as she places a blonde hairpiece evoking a 1950s housewife upon her head. “Chloe looks great in period wigs,” she says in a soft Bronx accent. “She wears the wig, the wig does not wear her.”

It’s the highest of praise from Mancuso, the longtime hair designer head at the live sketch comedy show. She knows the back of each cast member’s head like the back of her own hand: Their wig blocks—essentially, styrofoam versions of their skulls—line her hair room. Drawn in sharpie are their exact hairlines and ear placement.

Mancuso always had the sense that she was destined to do hair. Her uncle styled on Broadway, and her mother used to cut her friends’ hair in the kitchen. Despite being untrained, she was amazing at it. “We weirdly always had a knack for hair,” Mancuso says now.

After getting her GED at 16, Mancuso couldn’t afford to go to hair school, so for a while she groomed dogs instead. Then, one day, she got a call from her uncle: Could she join him on 42nd Street?