Ever since Charithra Chandran was announced as a new cast member for Netflix's One Piece season two, fans around the world wondered how she would look with blue hair for her role as Vivi in the show. We got the answer when the first teasers for the season dropped in summer 2025, but now Chandran is pulling back the curtain even more and letting us in on how Vivi's wig came to be.
In a new cover story for Teen Vogue, Chandran appears alongside Iñaki Godoy, who plays Monkey D. Luffy, the leader of the Straw Hat Pirates in One Piece. During our interview, Chandran reveals that she nicknamed the wig “Vicky” or “Victoria” on good days and “Sticky-Icky-Tricky Vicky” when she’s “being naughty.” (For those wondering, Miss Wednesday’s jacket was also christened as “Vivian.”)
Here, Chandran shares more about the process of getting her wig custom-made before she even set sail for Cape Town, South Africa, where the show is filmed.
Calling in from her trailer while getting the wig installed for her next shoot, Chandran tells Teen Vogue that the process of fitting Vicky to her head actually began an ocean away. She had her head wrapped and measured for the custom wig in London, where she resides when she’s not filming the show, and it wasn’t until she arrived on set that she got to try it on for the first time.
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Chandran says she was “really nervous” about having to wear blue hair. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I've never dyed my hair and I'm going to have blue hair! What is this going to look like?'” she recalls. She wanted a peek at what the wig would look like as soon as she got the measurements. “I was like, ‘Oh, do you have any pictures?’ She was like, ‘No, no, no. They had an external person do it,’” she tells us as her team plucks individual hairs from Vicky’s hairline.
But all of Chandran’s reservations about the wig dissipated as soon as she met her team in Cape Town. “I [saw] how much thought and consideration they had put in, and then how much work had gone into it after meeting me and I felt so good,” she says. “And then what was crazy is how quickly I got used to it, how quickly I was like, ‘Oh yeah,’ and how normal it all felt.”
Chandran continues, “This is one of those [examples] where things in the anime or the manga might not necessarily directly translate [because] we are human beings with undertones,” noting the blue wig, which she had already assured fans would exceed expectations prior to the premiere of season two.
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“For it to look natural and for it to be believable, it has to be really thoughtful," Chandran says further. "And the lead hairstylist took a long time to make sure to get the undertones right and to make it feel like it was growing out of my hair. I'm really grateful for that. It means it's going to have darker roots, but I think it makes the character feel more lifted, and it feels more real.” (Chandran is particularly proud of how the wig looks in Little Garden against the green scenery. “I think that's when the hair really shines,” she says.)
It takes a village to install Chandran’s Vivi wig (which I was privy to during our conversation), as Chandran has shown followers with a brand-new time-lapse posted to her TikTok. The actor also let us know that the team worked on two versions of the wig: a “quite heavy” version for when she’s introduced as Miss Wednesday, which features a snatched top pony and “extra extensions”; and the one fans get to see throughout most of the season, with a softer pony and curtain bangs that frame Chandran’s face.
Chandran says it took the team an hour and a half when it was Miss Wednesday, but now that the process is slightly simplified, they “got it down to a fine science of an hour.”
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While Vicky will always be Chandran’s favorite wig, the actor says, she's “so about that wig life” and has been since she appeared as Edwina Sharma in season two of Bridgerton, another hit Netflix show featuring wigs galore. It’s because these shows have shown her how good wigs can be that Chandran is hesitant to change up her actual hair. So if you see her out and about in a bob with bangs, that’s a wig from her own personal collection. “I feel so mysterious wearing her,” she adds.
Charithra Chandran and her wig Vicky will return for One Piece season three, so get ready to see the duo in action a lot more in the future.
