Looking the part
Barry star Anthony Carrigan tells how losing his hair opened doors in Hollywood. Julie Eley reports.
Anthony Carrigan, the Chechen mobster Noho Hank in the dark SoHo2 comedy Barry, feels that actors get the jobs they’re meant to – and he’s a case in point.
Noho Hank is totally bald, no facial hair whatsoever. And that’s no sleight-of-hand makeup trickery, for Carrigan suffers from alopecia, an autoimmune condition that causes hair loss.
“I started out in my career with hair, eyebrows and eyelashes. I’d had alopecia since I was three but it got really bad to the extent that I lost the majority of my hair,” he says.
“I had to change my tack and try something different and it was like, ‘I can play some really cool characters’ and at first it was mainly aliens.
“But one of the things I was told, and really stuck with me, was that the right people would know what to do with the way I looked and I really trusted that.
“Well, going into this project with Bill (Hader, the co-creator and star of Barry), well, he’s one of those people. He knows how to take this look and do something really fun with it. It’s been pretty much the ideal place to land with that kind of predicament.” Carrigan’s character Noho Hank gets a bigger role in the second season of the hit show, which earned Emmys for Hader and Henry Winkler (yes, he was the Fonz). Barry is about a low-rent Mid West hitman trying to become an actor, but struggling to break free of his past. He was a marine in Afghanistan and continued to do what he had learned there – killing people – when he returned home. In season one, he was sent to Los Angeles to kill an actor having an affair with Chechen crime lord Goran Pazar’s wife. He joins the actor’s acting class, run by Gene Cousineau (Winkler) and begins to find the support and acceptance he’s been missing in his life. But the Chechens keep a tight hold on Barry, and force him to carry out more assassinations, although Barry becomes conflicted about his personality, wondering whether he can change what he feels is his nature. Season one
“I’d had alopecia since I was three but it got really bad to the extent that I lost the majority of my hair.” – Anthony Carrigan
ended with Barry killing Pazar, leaving his deputy Noho Hank as the gang’s new leader. Hank, like Barry, is conflicted. “He’s thoughtful, sweet, a bit of a people pleaser and he does care deeply about Barry. He might be a crime lord, but he’s trying his best to be kind, considerate, polite, but as a leader he finds it more and more difficult to get his hands dirty,” says Carrigan.
He is full of praise for Hader and co writer Alec Berg.
“Bill wrote such a lovely character, a character who was really nuanced, really different, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before so I really owe it to them,” he says.
Talking to Hader, you get a sense of why they got on so well. Both have battled conditions which could have destroyed their careers.
For Carrigan, it was his alopecia. For Hader it was his lifelong anxiety and he draws parallels with Barry, the character he created and plays.
“The show’s about your nature and can you change that?
“I’ve been so anxious since I was a kid and you go, ‘Can I change that?’,” he says.
“You can’t change it, you just have to manage it. So I go, ‘Oh, I’m getting anxious’ and I try to avoid things that make me anxious.
“One thing I read is a Buddhist thing. You don’t put a narrative on it, you don’t say I’m getting anxious because season two’s coming out. You take out the season two and then I’m just anxious. You like just hold it in your hand and that’s what being anxious looks like and then it dissipates really fast.”
That anxiety may have something to do with what he says is being modest to a fault.
He shares the story of Emmy night, when he won the award for Best Actor In A Comedy Show.
No champagne and victory party for him.
“Afterwards I went out and got a burger, and the woman who served me said, ‘Didn’t you just win an Emmy’, and I was like, ‘I did’.
“And she said, ‘Who was in there with you?’ and I said, ‘Just me’, and she said, ‘That’s sad’.”