Why Does Dennis Quaid Wear a Braid in ‘Full Circle’?

As the Steven Soderbergh–Ed Solomon series Full Circle concludes on Max, many questions plaguing its protagonists will, at last, find answers. What’s going on with CCH Pounder, and why is she organizing this whole kidnapping situation? What happened with Timothy Olyphant’s past to give him all these conflicted feelings about this other kidnapped kid? How do all these families connect to a high-end condo development in Guyana? Sometimes, though, a question can linger even after a series ends. A wayward strand, an atypical texture not fully woven into the tapestry of a story, can escape from the smooth pattern of a narrative and continue to draw the eye even after everything else has been carefully knotted away. Sometimes, it’s important to pursue that remaining concern. Sometimes you have to spend time pondering why Dennis Quaid is wearing his hair in a French braid.

In Full Circle, a thriller that begins with a kidnapping and eventually unfurls into an international conspiracy encompassing mysticism, greed, and violence, Dennis Quaid plays Jeff, a celebrity chef whose star rose to prominence on the back of a popular tomatillo sauce. While his daughter Sam (Claire Danes) runs his culinary empire, Jeff moves through the world with his graying brown hair tied back in a ponytail, the culmination of a French braid that extends roughly from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.

The style suggests innumerable lines of inquiry: Within the world of the show, who plaits this French braid? Does Jeff do it himself? Does his wife do it? Does he ask a braiding favor of his chess-playing buddies at the park, or maybe some of his faintly criminal gambling associates? How old was Jeff when he decided a braid was his look? Unfortunately, we may never know the answers to these mysteries, as Jeff’s full backstory is never explained. However, it is possible to pursue another question, namely:

To uncover what went on here, Vulture turned to Adenike Wright, the head of the hair department on Full Circle.

“When you get a job, you reach out to actors and ask them if they have any needs or concerns, or any ideas about what they want to do,” Wright says. “I’d been reaching out to him for weeks, and he kept saying, I’m going to get back to you. We had a photo shoot for all the still photos you see around the publisher’s office in the show, and the day before, it was maybe six o’clock at night, he calls me. ‘Hey, Adenike, I want a ponytail.’ I was like, What?! I don’t know you, I have never seen you in person, I don’t even know your hair color, I don’t have a ponytail for you. How are we going to do this? He said, ‘Oh, you’ll figure it out.’”

Wright’s wig supplier was only open until 7 p.m. that day, and she called frantically after hanging up with Quaid, begging them to stay open long enough for her to get there and find a wig that would work for Quaid’s ponytail request. “I was figuring this thing out with Google pictures, because I didn’t know how long his hair was, what color it was,” Wright says. There was no wig that seemed like a good match, so Wright’s supplier cut one to fit and added new clips that night.

“We get there the morning of, and Dennis is like, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine! Don’t worry about it,’” Wright says. But the wig she brought wouldn’t quite work with Quaid’s short hair. “‘I cannot put this ponytail into your hair without a braid,’” she told him. “‘It’s not long enough. It’s not going to blend. The only way to blend it is to add the braid.’ He was like, ‘Oh, I love it. Let’s do it.’”

“I asked him, what’s the story with this ponytail,” Wright says, “and he said, ‘Oh, it’s an homage to Steven Seagal. You know, stuck in his ways, didn’t want to change his look.’ And here we are now.”

Here we are now, indeed: left with even more unanswerable questions. What exactly was it about Steven Seagal that inspired Quaid’s performance of Jeff the Chef? Wright does not know. And she insists the ponytail had nothing to do with the other skeezy, notably ponytailed chef, Mario Batali. “He didn’t mention that. He only mentioned Steven. I was like … okay!”

Wright notes the unexpected ponytail did require a minor adjustment to the script once shooting started, a brief reference in the pilot episode about whether Quaid’s character would keep the ponytail for his next book promotion. “Ed Solomon was like, Okay, so there’s a ponytail? He had to write it into the story, Ed had to be creative. You can’t just let that kind of thing go and not mention it.”

The braid does insist on being mentioned. There is an immediate, ineffable weirdness to it that communicates something specific about Jeff the Chef. Perhaps there really is some Seagalian fossilization to the braid, an impression that Jeff’s personality hardened at one precise moment of youthful experimentation. There’s an innocence as well: In contemporary American culture, this particular type of braid is more commonly associated with sleepovers and volleyball and juvenilia, precisely because it’s difficult — not impossible, but tricky — to execute on your own hair. It implies parenting or, at the very least, peers with ample downtime. It’s a braid that suggests either significant investment in learning a skill or, more likely, being cared for rather than being the caregiver.

Is any of that purposeful? It’s doubtful, given the braid’s rushed origins. And sometimes a braid is just a braid. “I mean, it’s fabulous,” says Wright. “But it’s just like … I can’t believe he made me do that.”