Elijah Wood doesn’t wear wigs, but he certainly doesn’t speak for every actor who’s ever appeared in an early-2000s franchise based on a popular fantasy book series. Jason Isaacs—a.k.a. Lucius Malfoy, a.k.a. an on-screen Targaryen before there were on-screen Targeryens—loves to change up his hair.
In a recent interview with The A.V. Club, Isaacs spent some time expounding on the many eras of his luscious, fake locks—a topic he was clearly a little giddy to discuss. “I love a wig,” he said. “Men don’t get to play dress up very much as actors.” While many millennials may recognize Isaacs more for his blonde Slytherin tresses than his actual face, this wasn’t the only time he’s gotten to change up his look for the camera. The actor also got to wear “fabulous wigs galore” in The Patriot and Peter Pan, and actually wore a different wig each time he came back for Harry Potter. That’s a lot of wigs.
The fun didn’t stop with Isaacs’ most recent project, BritBox’s Archie, in which he plays Cary Grant. “Cary Grant, luckily, I play over many years, so I have a bunch of different looks that the makeup, hair, and costume people did an extraordinary job on making me look less like me,” he said. “I don’t know that I look like Cary Grant, but I clearly don’t look like me.”
“I like disguise,” he continued. “It’s not very grown up, but it’s what I do for a living.” (This may or may not start a fight, for the record, but he also believes he had the best wand in Harry Potter and the best lightsaber in the (animated) Star Wars Rebels.) But even with all these alternate looks, Isaacs isn’t trying to go totally undetected in public; he enjoys being approached by fans, with one important caveat: “As long as they don’t stab me, I’m happy.”