The Monsters’ Nicholas Alexander Chavez isn’t splitting hairs over Lyle Menendez’s “heartbreaking” toupee

Anyone who streamed Netflix Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez knew they would be in for a most disturbing sight. But while we may have been prepared for the siblings’ murder of their parents, we were completely unprepared for the stunning scene in the first episode where Lyle’s mother violently rips off his hairpiece during a free dinner. all.

“The toupee really became a symbol for me,” Nicholas Alexander Chavez tells TVLine. When I played Lyle, who along with his younger brother is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, “I thought a lot about mask work – like, who are we compared to who we say we are?”

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“Sometimes the person we say we are,” he adds, “isn’t even someone we choose. Sometimes it’s an identity imposed on us by someone else.”

In Lyle’s case, it was his abusive father who cast him into the role of the alpha male, someone who was expected to be perfect in every way – let alone bald. That wasn’t the image Dad wanted to convey when he tried to turn his dysfunctional family into a second coming of the Kennedys. So “he forced Lyle to wear a toupee,” Chavez says. “And that became a symbol of Lyle being oppressed as a human being and being denied his own individuality, which I found absolutely heartbreaking.”

Her reaction to the devastating turn of events, one of so many in Monster? Write it in a comment below.

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