Nicholas Alexander Chavez took his role as Lyle Menendez in Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story extremely seriously, and that included portraying several emotional scenes involving wigs and toupees.
Chavez plays Lyle opposite Cooper Koch‘s Erik Menendez in the second season of the true crime-inspired anthology series from co-creator Ryan Murphy. While the series has faced some backlash, including from the Menendez brothers themselves, Chavez appears to have approached his role delicately.
In a new interview, Chavez opened up about how crucial his hair was to playing the character, particularly as Lyle dealt with baldness throughout the story.
“I really saw this wig as [a] mask of sorts,” Chavez told Deadline in an interview published on Friday, September 27. “It’s not one that he imposes on himself. It’s imposed by his father and the perfectionist standard that Lyle has to live up to.”
Referencing the more tragic aspects of the story, Chavez said of Lyle’s toupee, “It’s a mask that hides a deeply, deeply wounded inner child who surfaces in episode four.”
Chavez was able to draw on the lived experiences of people he knew in Los Angeles who had knowledge of Lyle and Erik Menendez for his performance.
“When you’re working on a project about the Menéndez brothers, especially living in Los Angeles where they lived, you meet a great many people who are one degree or two degrees of separation away from others who directly interfaced with them,” Chavez told the outlet.
“It was interesting because several of the people who I met with told me that they could tell that Lyle was wearing a piece,” the actor explained.
Learning how to wear a toupee or wig was crucial to Chavez’s performance as Lyle as it impacted a number of pivotal scenes.
“And when you wear a piece, there is certain behavior that goes along with that,” Chavez said. “You sort of angle your head in a very, very specific way, maybe even subconsciously, to try to keep distance between it and the person that you’re talking to.”
While the Grotesquerie star did utilize some hair pieces during filming, his hair was also manipulated to appear as though he was wearing a wig.
“They used my real hair for almost the entire production, but styled it to look like it was a toupée by teasing it,” Chavez revealed to Deadline.
“The only time where it’s not my real hair is if there’s a gag,” he explained. “So if the wig comes off, like the scene at the dinner table, or the scene where it gets snatched off while I’m in the prison showers, they would put the bald cap on.”