Dyeing for a role

Dax Shepard changes his looks again, this time to play the fastest cashier at a store.

On Ashton Kutcher's popular MTV comedy reality series Punk'd, Dax Shepard was the comedic man of a thousand faces who would wear wigs and mustaches to catch celebrities in outlandish, embarrassing situations. "I knew this was my one shot and pushed it as far as I could,'' he said.

He's brought the same master-of-disguise act to the big screen. "I gained 30 pounds and dyed my hair black for this Mike Judge movie I did, Idiocracy," Shepard explained. "Then I did Zathura and I had to dye my hair brown. Then I did Let's Go to Prison, and I gained 20 pounds of muscle and grew my hair really long and grew a beard.''

For his latest film, Employee of the Month, he dyed his hair a Billy Idol-blond and even waxed the hair from his forearms. "I like to really change up my look when I do a movie because my acting's very weak,'' he deadpanned.

In the comedy, Shepard plays the thoroughly obnoxious Vince Downey, the fastest cashier in the Southwest at a Costco-like warehouse store. Vince has won Employee of the Month 17 times in a row and will receive a "newish'' 2005 car if he can make it 18.

Stand-up comic Dane Cook plays the store's affable box boy Zach, who decides to go for the employee of the month honours when he learns that the newest cashier (Jessica Simpson) only dates winners of the title.

"I approached this role as if I were Tom Cruise in Cocktail," Shepard said. "I wanted to be really flashy.'' But trying to dye his naturally light brown hair white blond took a lot of work.

It began by going to "a local hairstylist for the first round of bleaching,'' Shepard recalled. "That was an eight-hour day, which ended with my hair being the colour of papaya.'' He went back the following day for another eight hours of bleaching; his hair came out brown.

"Then we had a third four-hour day with a guy who did punk rock hairstyles,'' said Shepard. "He made it white, but it took so much bleaching and astringent that half of my hair fell out.''

That's how he looked when production started. But halfway through the film, his hair looks even whiter because he got a new dye job when his roots started growing out. The decision to wax his forearms was a "double whammy,'' Shepard said. "It exudes metrosexuality. Because I work with my hands and I am the fastest cashier in the Southwest, obviously I would have pretty developed forearms that I would want to show off for the ladies.''

Even as a kid, Shepard tried to make people laugh, but generally his jokes, quips and pranks didn't sit well with his teachers. When he was in eighth grade, Shepard bought clippers and began giving out haircuts to his classmates. "I gave one kid a Mohawk,'' he said. He escaped being expelled by throwing away the shears and promising not to do that again.

Part of the reason he was the class clown was that he was "horrendously'' dyslexic, Shepard said. "I had to get pulled out of class every day for special ed,'' he recalled. "It was a humiliating process. Everyone thought I was slow, so as a defense mechanism, I tried to make people laugh.''

At 20, he auditioned for Punk'd. At the sixth outing he met Kutcher. "We just clicked,'' he said. The series took off when it premiered in 2003, and Shepard became a recognisable character overnight.