Guy Fieri was wearing a wig in his viral birthday video, the celebrity chef revealed Monday, along with the reason for the bizarre makeover.
Fieri disclosed that his “new look” is for an upcoming Super Bowl ad for the German home appliances company Bosch. Fan interest in his transformation grew after Fieri posted a video on Instagram on Thursday, blowing out candles for his 58th birthday. The Fieri in the video sports a very different ensemble than his 20-plus-year-old style: slacks and a collared shirt, sans the goatee and spiked blonde hair that have characterized the cooking star.
The video creeped out some fans, who wrote in the comments section that they “didn’t like” whatever was going on. Fieri’s son joked that his dad looks like he “sells insurance.” Fieri posted another video on Monday, this time tied to the Super Bowl game on Feb. 8.
Fieri, as fans are used to seeing him, sits in a barber chair, looking nervous, as the sound of a hair clipper roars behind him. Viewers hear “I’m just a guy” over and over while signature Fieri flashes back and forth with the bare-faced, transformed one, before teasing the date to the big game. He explained to Entertainment Weekly that he was offered the ad for Bosch, in which he’d trade in his famous look to become a new “Guy.”
The new post is captioned, “Just a little Big Game buzz.”
“Just a couple weeks prior, getting fitted for the wig and the whole thing, I realized that Bosch was really going to lean in,” he said, telling the site that he filmed the ad in Vancouver. It was “a little bit of an in-office dare,” he added, “Like, ‘Would Guy Fieri really do this?’” He signed on, but admitted that he has some anxiety about how fans will react to it, which his Monday teaser reflects.
“My commitment to doing this was, ‘OOK, we’re playing big ball. And I’ll play,” he said. “What it turned out to be, what people are going to see, I’m just gonna turn my phone off for about three weeks after this, because people are gonna hammer me.” Fieri was hammered in a different way in the comments of his Thursday posts, with fans pointing out that the video appeared AI-generated.
That’s how unbelievable it is that Fieri would go through with the transformation, he told EW. “My wife said to me, ‘I gotta see this. I gotta be there for this,’” he added.
