The premiere episode of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story features a bloody double-murder and quite a bit of Milli Vanilli, but the most shocking moment might actually be the revelation that the image-obsessed Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) wears a toupee.
The moment comes during a vicious dinner-table argument at the Menendez house — which we soon find out is a common occurrence — when Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez (Chloë Sevigny) violently tears off her eldest son’s toupee. This is much to the shock and horror of Erik (Cooper Koch), who had no idea that the brother he idolized had lost his hair years earlier. Lyle reveals that their father, José (Javier Bardem), forced him to get it — this helps to open Erik’s eyes to the extent of their parents’ cruelty.
“Lyle’s wig was always a character,” said co-creator Ryan Murphy on Nov. 2 at The Fall Edit, a Netflix FYC panel for the limited series in Los Angeles. “It was so much about [Lyle’s] vulnerability, the father’s point of view. So we spent a lot of time working, getting that right and working with Nicholas, too, so that he felt comfortable.”
For Karen Bartek, the head of the hair department for Monsters, the challenge was in walking a fine line between exaggerated and believable. “I did a lot of the research on the Menendez [brothers],” Bartek said. “I remember [them] because I grew up in the ’80s in LA. We had a wig made for [Nicholas], and then we had a sidepiece and a toppiece. But the wig didn’t really work … Ryan didn’t want it to look over-the-top and be too ’80s because it could get so bad really fast ... We ended up using a toupee and the sidepiece for his bald reveal — it was a lot of camera tests.”
There was another fine line Bartek had to walk: The toupee had to be a good toupee but not too good; it had to be credible enough that the reveal was shocking but bad enough that it was recognizable as a fake. “It was really just whatever worked for the actor to make them look the part, but not too over-the-top,” said Bartek. “And I find with putting wigs on people, sometimes if they’re too perfect and they don’t move, they look like a wig.”
Another perfect pairing of actor to wig was Ari Graynor and her bouncy curls, which helped her embody Erik’s defense attorney Leslie Abramson. “That wig — it became her,” said Bartek. “She just wore it, and it looked like it was her hair to me.”
Graynor agreed. “I mean, there really is no Leslie without it.”
Stream Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story now.
