Lea Michele.
Credit: Lea Michele/TikTok; Matthew Murphy
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Lea Michele explained why she wears a wig that looks a lot like her own hair for her role in Chess on Broadway
Michele plays Florence Vassy in the musical revival
The star previously told PEOPLE that she still gets stage fright and shared the pre-show ritual that calms her nerves
Lea Michele is peeling back the curtain on her Broadway look.
On Wednesday, March 11, the 39-year-old actress revealed why she wears a wig — that looks a lot like her own hair — to play Florence Vassy in Chess.
“Everyone wants to know about the wig and why I’m wearing a wig,” she begins a video shared to TikTok. As she chats to the camera, the Glee alum is getting ready backstage.
She goes on to explain that her hair is “naturally really, really curly” and “takes me forever” to blow out and straighten, which is the style her character wears in the musical revival. Heat styling her hair every single night would simply cause too much damage, she continues, so the production team created wigs.
“I mean, how bad would that be for my hair?” says Michele, who adds that another perk of the wig is that she can easily switch up her hair for act two of the show. “By using a wig, not only would it protect my hair from damage and putting heat on it every night, we could then do something different in act two,” she explains.
The singer ends the clip saying, “That’s the story of the wig. And she’s fierce. I love her. I would wear her every day.”
Lea Michele in Chess.
Credit: Matthew Murphy
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In a follow-up video that shows Michele getting the wig put on, she shares a photo of her hair in its naturally curly state.
“I love it, I wear my hair natural like that all the time,” she says, adding the caveat: “[It’s] cute for, like, 30 minutes and then after that it’s wild.”
The Broadway veteran previously told PEOPLE that she still gets stage fright.
“Oh, I still deal with stage fright all the time,” she admitted. “It is something I’ve battled my entire life, no matter what project.”
She continued that the nerves never really go away, no matter how experienced she gets, but she’s learned how to “reframe” the experience.
“I try to reframe those feelings, because I can be really quick to categorize everything I’m feeling as anxiety, and that’s not always the case,” she said. “So now I take a beat. If I really tune into how I’m feeling and give myself the space and the grace to actually examine those emotions, I can realize, ‘Well, maybe it’s not anxiety? Maybe it’s not all fear? Maybe there’s room for the fact it could actually be excitement in there for what I’m about to do?’ And I’ll transfer my energy into that as much as I can.”
“If I’m nervous, it just means that what I’m doing matters,” she added. “I’ll tell myself, ‘It’s worth it. It matters. There are high stakes to what you’re doing. It’s a challenge.’ And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, you know?”
To calm her nerves before a show, Michele said that she calls her mom, Edith Sarfati. During their chat, the two “just catch up and talk about our days,” she shared. “It’s very normal, very easy conversation.”
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