The Umbrella Academy Boss Explains the Season 3 Premiere Detail You May Have Missed (Hint: It's About Ben)

Nearly two years passed between the release of The Umbrella Academy‘s second and third seasons — and Ben Hargreeves apparently used that hiatus to get a haircut.

The Umbrella Academy Ben Bangs
The Umbrella Academy Ben Bangs

Of course, there was so much going on during the Netflix drama’s Season 3 premiere — most notably, a trippy, Footloose-inspired dance sequence — that you wouldn’t be blamed for overlooking some of the episode’s minutiae. But upon revisiting the final moments of the Season 2 finale, when the Sparrow Academy was first introduced, we noticed something had changed when the Season 3 opener kicked off with the exact same scene: Ben was no longer sporting the long, asymmetrical bangs that he originally flaunted in the sophomore conclusion, and actor Justin H. Min couldn’t have been more thrilled about the change.

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“You know, they talk about the happiest day in your life,” Min jokes, reflecting on the day that Ben’s ‘do was changed during Season 3 production. “The bangs had a great run, but they had to go. They kept falling out. It was going to be a nightmare to film with that, so the hair went up, and we called it a day.”

The switcheroo came from series creator Steve Blackman, who laughs to TVLine that he “couldn’t stand” the hairpiece used on Min for the Season 2 finale, prompting a hairstyle change that he says was worth the continuity error between episodes.

“We shot that [original] scene on the very last day of Season 2, and I did not want them to do that to his hair,” Blackman shares. “It’s supposed to be continuous [into Season 3], but… I wanted to change it. So did Justin, so we did a little flip of that.”

Min adds that because he shaved his head while in quarantine during the pandemic, attaching Ben’s long bangs to a buzz cut would have been more impractical than ever.

“It would have been really, really tough,” he admits. “Thank you, Steve Blackman, for making that executive decision.”

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