Copyright Variety
Shunika Terry, the hair designer of “Sinners,” recalls the first time she saw a photo of one of the film’s stars, Miles Caton. Seeing his “locs,” she thought, “Yeah, he’s going to have to cut his hair.” This came after director Ryan Coogler had asked her to work on his supernatural thriller, where Caton plays the son of a preacher. Sammie (Caton) is called on by his twin cousins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) to sing at their latest business venture, the juke joint. Except when the sun sets, vampires descend on the community. The film is set in the 1930s Mississippi Delta, so Terry wanted to get every detail right. “After Miles agreed to commit to that, he got the haircut,” she says. Texture was important to Sammie’s story. Before he goes on the journey, he’s working out in the field picking cotton. To reflect that, Terry says, “After Miles cut his hair, we created a little coil in the kink of his hair because I wanted to portray that he’s working in the hot sun.” When Sammie jumps in the car with his cousins, Terry says, “We fluffed it out, picked it out and patted it down to make it smooth.” She adds, those details were tiny, but still were important to Sammie’s journey. The film’s pivotal sequence is when Sammie sings “I Lied to You” at the juke joint and the tone shifts; he pierces a supernatural veil and the dance floor is filled with musicians and dancers from across time: past, present and future. Terry calls the West African griot who appears in the juke joint one of her “favorite creations.” She wanted him to feel “very ancestral.” She researched different images and sent them to her team in New Orleans to create the hairpiece for the character. “Texture was important,” she says. “I want it as high as possible. When he moves his head, I want to see it move.”
