I first went to Ecuador in the 90s. I’d had a beard in college and kept the mustache after entering the work world. People frequently compared my looks to Sam Elliot (in Mask) or Chuck Norris. I’ve written a number of times about my experience in South America – streets lined with walls topped with glass and barbed wire, armed guards on stools in front of almost every residence, “watchimen” who collected small change for keeping an eye on your automobile while you parked, auto exhaust, heat, the sun as a physical presence with a weight like gravity. Additionally, in NY, I’d been a person who was able to put everything into a quantifiable box: this look means x, that word means y. There was no reason to react emotionally- I could very logically and unfeelingly assess and put away almost every encounter. In Ecuador, the boxes were taken away. I understood the words (Spanish), but not necessarily the meanings. The classic example: one afternoon, I was sitting around in a t-shirt when a student came by to ask me a question. After a few minutes, he stated “Me encanta su camisa.” Translates: “I love your shirt.” I had no idea if the student was being snide, making a cultural comment, or if the words were literally true. I only had the words and I could not put them into the appropriate box.
Without my boxes, I began to react to everything emotionally. There was an episode of Star Trek where Spock started to have feelings. That was exactly how I felt. I had emotional reactions to everything — people burning trash in public parks, a bank teller who sent me to see the manager at closing — and I could not formulate any significant meaning out of the events in which I found myself engaged. In retrospect, it was a remarkable learning experience. At the time, I felt confused and exhausted. When I returned to the U.S., my hair had turned 85% white. Snow white. I won’t attribute the entire transition to culture shock or third world living – there is a genetic component as well. My mother went grey at a very young age. Still, it was a shock. I’d previously had a scalp of hair that denied no color- strands of black, red, blond, brown and variant shades of each had filled my head (my body, mustache and beard retained those colors even after my scalp went white).
I was dating a woman who was eight years younger than me and she felt the white hair made me look far too old. I was not the type to dye my hair, so she bought some Clairol and offered to treat me salon style. Having always been a sucker for hands on my scalp, I caved. We dated for four years and during that time I got used to having my hair dyed, although after a time or two I had to learn to do it myself. Oddly, the white hair took the dye at different depths of tone, so it rather mimicked the hair on my eyebrows, arms and face.
It was around this time that I began to study acting and eventually audition in the New York market. My first NYC role was as G. Gordon Liddy (yes, the mustache helped). It began a string of roles in which I played “the heavy” (the antagonist, the villain). When my relationship went South (literally-she moved back to South America), I took a chance at letting my hair return to its natural color. Oddly now, instead of being seen as “the villain” I was more often called in for “the father.” Also, now that I was back in the dating world, my ex had planted in my brain the consideration that my hair color made me look “too old” (her words). After six months of not being cast, I dyed my hair. Buona Fortuna. I was back in the casting mix within weeks.
I never thought much of the dying. It was part of my job. However, it sometimes confused matters. I was doing extra work on some episodic (it was a funeral scene). I went onto the set, looked about the room and spent some time deciding on what my relationship was with various people, the deceased, etc. I’d decided that he was my cousin, that we’d known each other intimately when we were young and then hadn’t seen each other for the last fifteen years. There was a moment in the eulogy where one of the main characters spoke about distances and I let it affect me. It made me somber and sad. After the scene, I noticed one of the producers walking around – he’d noticed my face and seemed to make a mental note. A few days later, I got a call from the casting agency. “Are you blonde?” “No.” “Are you sure?” “My hair is a medium hazelnut brown, why?” There was no reply. She hung up. It only occurred to me later that perhaps the man who noticed me on set had seen me as blond. (I was convinced my hair color was what it said on the bottle).
The hair dye was trickier when it came to dating. Was I lying about my appearance? My age? Did it mean anything at all? I had some easy answers (to myself) – either I would say it was part of my trade or that the point of hair dye, like any other appearance altering (or enhancing) item -jewelry, clothing, tattoos, etc. — was that it more closely approximated how one feels about the self. Of course, when you see the 80 year old who dresses like the 18 year old, those sort of comparisons get strained.
I never considered the expense – since my hair was short, I would split one bottle of hair dye into thirds and that would last me for six weeks. Due to the white roots, I had to dye pretty much every 10-14 days. Once I had a child, it became much harder to keep up with the procedure. Working a day job for rent, going on auditions, taking care of my son (doing homework, making school pick-ups and drop offs, cooking dinner), I would sometimes go until my roots almost rivaled my dyed-hair in length.
I admit, when I showed up at auditions and saw the other actors who had obvious dye jobs, I began to reconsider. I generally did a good job on my hair, but the doubt creeps in that one lies to the self if the truth hurts. There weren’t too many role models out of Hollywood. Steve Martin was a young white-headed dude who let the hair come in as it was. Terrence Stamp – but that came with time. And forget rockers – do you really think Steven Tyler has long dark hair at 67? In pop culture, there is no such thing as aging gracefully and therefore any sign of what is seen as “aging” is shunned – even if it comes a bit early.
In 2013, I had the good fortune to work on Birdman. It was an small part as a stage hand at the theatre where “What We Talk About” was being staged (part of the film). It was fifteen days work and I went through a battery of auditions to get the part, even though it was technically background. The turning event for me was watching Michael Keaton. He is in the decade ahead of me now, but while he was in decent shape, he didn’t buff up for the part knowing he’d be in his underwear. In fact, there was something akin to raw courage in the way he confronted the role of an actor trying to make a comeback and all of his physical changes were on display- his hair had largely left him, his skin wore his age, though his body sported almost no extra weight. He legs were thinner-the legs of an older man. There was no effort at pretense- he went for raw truth. I felt it in the studio, but it was even more evident in the movie theatre where the large screen magnifies all our human blemishes and stands them before audiences like neon signs. There was truth on his side, and it overpowered anything else you might think about his physical being. Truth. Isn’t that what we’re after? As actors? As human beings?
So the performance stayed with me. And I began to think again about the purpose of hair dye. Is it, like fiction, a lie that tells the truth? Or does it cover something even more frightening because it’s true – age. Mortality. You are not 18 any longer. Satchel Paige is credited with saying “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?” In the U.S., if you look at the behavior of most of us, we are teenagers. We loathe aging and we make old people go away to Florida (only half joking; the other half go to Arizona).
I had a few projects lined up, so changing my hair color was not an immediate possibility. I had also spent hundreds of dollars on my headshots and business cards. Replacing those would be unnecessarily expensive. And yet the voice grated at my ear. Truth. And finally, this past summer, when I had several months between jobs, I let it grow out.
It took me a long time to get used to my reflection in the mirror (I can’t say I’m still 100% adjusted). As soon as my hair was more white than dye, people started offering me their seat on the bus, even though I might be wearing a NYC Marathon jacket. They were clearly not looking at my frame, my clothes or my face -the hair alone had determined for them how old I must be. At first I found this daunting: “do I really want the white of my hair to be the only thing that people see?” “Will it be the same in the casting session?” “Will people suddenly add 20 years to my age?” “What about women? Have I just surrendered the possibility of dating anyone under 70?”
So far, the hair hasn’t made a difference in the casting. I played a Vietnam vet in a comedy and an organ harvesting doctor in another short film within months of letting my hair return to truth. I have two more projects coming up early this year, as a dying man who asks for a heart and as a prison guard who runs a gang inside the jail. I no longer have to worry about matching my hair dye for continuity if we shoot for more than two weeks or if the roots are growing out enough for the camera to see. And the look is growing on me. But the biggest change has been the willingness to let the raw truth be on my side.