Off with the wig
It took 10 years of the L.A. acting grind before Simone Missick landed her role as police detective Misty Knight in Netf lix’s “Luke Cage” series. And many of her anxieties around the auditioning process revolved around her hair.
“When I first moved to L.A., it was very much this feeling of you need to have a weave to be successful,” she said. “This seemed like one of the things the gatekeepers required.”
Missick waited tables to scrape together enough money for expensive hair styles. In addition to straight hair, she found success with a curly wig — one she and her friends nicknamed “book ’em.”
“I booked dozens and dozens of commercials with this curly look,” she said.
Missick even had two sets of headshots. For “fun, friendly, best friend” roles, she used the curly-haired look; for the “smart, strong, assertive lawyer,” she went with straight hair shots. “It was such a mind trip,” she said.
Around 2009, with the help of celebrity hairstylist Felicia Leatherwood, Missick began to embrace her natural hair texture in everyday life. But it wasn’t until 2015 that she dared to wear her hair fully natural in an audition tape for Marvel’s “Luke Cage.”
“It was something about the character that made me say, ‘I’m going to wear my natural hair,’ ” she said. “I remember when I sent the audition to my manager, she said, ‘Your hair looks amazing.’ I had been with my manager for four years at the time, and she had never said anything about my look.”
“I got the call from Marvel saying, ‘You are Misty Knight.’ And they said, ‘We love your hair, don’t change a thing.’ ”