‘Monsters’ actor Nicholas Alexander Chavez talks about Lyle Menendez’s wig

Nicholas Alexander Chavez took on his role as Lyle Menendez on Netflix Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez extremely seriously, and this included depicting several emotional scenes with wigs and toupees.

Chavez plays opposite Lyle Cooper Koch‘S Erik Menendez in the second season of the co-creator’s true crime-inspired anthology series Ryan Murphy. While the series was met with some backlash, including from the Menendez brothers themselves, Chavez appears to have approached his role cautiously.

In a new interview, Chavez talked about how important his hair was to portraying the character, especially since Lyle dealt with baldness throughout the story.

“I really saw this wig as [a] “A kind of mask,” Chavez said deadline in an interview published on Friday, September 27th. “It’s not something he forces himself to do. It is imposed by his father and the perfectionist standard Lyle must live up to.”

Referring to the more tragic aspects of the story, Chavez said of Lyle’s toupee, “It’s a mask that hides a deeply wounded inner child that emerges in episode four.”

For his performance, Chavez was able to draw on the lived experiences of people he knew in Los Angeles and who knew Lyle and Erik Menendez.

“When you work on a project about the Menéndez brothers, especially if you live in Los Angeles, where they lived, you meet a lot of people who are a degree or two removed from others who had direct contact with them,” Chavez said the outlet.

“It was interesting because several people I met with told me that they could tell Lyle was wearing an item,” the actor explained.

Learning to wear a toupee or wig was crucial to Chavez’s performance as Lyle, as it influenced a number of crucial scenes.

“And when you wear a piece, a certain behavior comes with it,” Chavez said. “You tilt your head in a very, very specific way, perhaps even unconsciously, to keep your distance from the person you’re talking to.”

While the grotesque When Star used some hairpieces during filming, his hair was also manipulated to look like he was wearing a wig.

“They used my real hair for most of the production, but backcombed it to look like a toupee,” Chavez revealed deadline.

“The only time it’s not my real hair is when there’s a gag,” he explained. “So when the wig comes off, like in the scene at the dinner table or the scene where it’s taken away from me in the prison showers, they put the bald head on.”