Monsters’ Nicholas Alexander Chavez Doesn’t Split Hairs About Lyle Menendez’s ‘Heartbreaking’ Toupée
Anyone who streamed Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story knew that they were going to be in for some extremely upsetting viewing. But, while we may have been braced for the siblings’ murders of their parents, we weren’t at all prepared for the jaw-dropping scene in the first episode in which Lyle’s mother violently rips off his hairpiece during a dinnertime free-for-all.
“The toupée really came to be a symbol for me,” Nicholas Alexander Chavez tells TVLine. In playing Lyle, who along with his younger brother is serving life without the possibility of parole, “I thought a lot about mask work — like, who are we versus who we pretend to be?
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“Sometimes the person we pretend to be,” he adds, “isn’t even someone that we self-select. Sometimes it’s an identity that’s being imposed upon us by someone else.”
In Lyle’s case, it was his abusive father who cast him in the role of alpha male, someone who was expected to be perfect in every way — and certainly not bald. That wasn’t the image that Dad wanted to convey as he attempted to turn his dysfunctional family into a second coming of the Kennedys. So he “forced Lyle to wear a toupée,” Chavez says. “And that became symbolic of Lyle being oppressed as a human being and not being allowed his own individuality, which I found absolutely heartbreaking.”
Your reaction to the devastating twist, one of so many in Monsters? Drop it in a comment below.
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