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

Chavez plays opposite Lyle Kuiper Koch‘S Erik Menendez in the second season of the co-creator’s true crime-inspired anthology series Ryan Murphy. While the series has received some backlash, including from the Menendez brothers themselves, Chavez appears to have taken a subtle approach to his role.

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

“I really saw this wig as a kind of mask,” Chavez said Term in an interview published on Friday, September 27. “It’s not something he imposes on himself. It is imposed by his father and the perfectionist standard that Lyle must meet.”

Referring to 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 that surfaces in episode four.”

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

“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 one or two degrees removed from others who came into direct contact with them,” Chavez said. the exhaust.

“It was interesting because several people I met told me they could see Lyle was wearing an item of clothing,” the actor explained.

Learning to wear a toupee or wig was crucial to Chavez’s performance as Lyle, as it affected several crucial scenes.

“And when you wear a piece of clothing, there are certain behaviors associated with it,” Chavez said. “You bow your head in a very, very specific way, maybe even unconsciously, to try to put distance between the head and the person you’re talking to.”

While the Big question The 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 almost the entire production, but styled it to look like a toupee by teasing it,” Chavez revealed to Term.

“The only time it’s not my real hair is when there’s a joke,” he explained. “So when the wig comes off, like the scene at the dinner table, or the scene where it gets ripped off while I’m in the prison showers, they put the bald cap on.”