Actor infuses flamboyant roles with depth, subtlety
After decades on cusp, Bartlett enjoys career renaissance
If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from the arc of Murray Bartlett’s career, it may be this: Never underestimate the power of a really great mustache.
A decade ago, the actor was grappling with professional doubts after a stint as a series regular on “Guiding Light” and a flurry of one-off parts in shows like “White Collar.” Feeling restless, he decided to spend a few months in Cairo with his then-partner, who is Egyptian, and grew a mustache to fit in better with the locals.
Out of the blue, he got an audition for an HBO series about a circle of gay friends living in San Francisco called “Looking.” He put himself on tape from Cairo and landed the part of Dom, a sexually magnetic waiter with a retro Tom Selleck ’stache. The quietly groundbreaking series, never a major hit, was “one of the first times where I realized that work could be like pure joy,” says Bartlett recently. “I like to think they liked other aspects of the audition, but the mustache was pretty pivotal in getting that role.”
Bartlett explains the deeper meaning of his facial-hair journey: “In these periods of doubt,
I’ve usually stepped away. Often, I’ll go traveling or do something different. And somehow it sort of brings me back, like it did there, where I was like, ‘You’re an idiot. You’re doing what you love, and you’re lucky to do it. So shut up.’ And somehow, it directed me to the next thing.”
Mike White was similarly charmed by Bartlett’s mustache when he was looking for the right person to play Armond, the beleaguered hotel manager whose spectacular unraveling fuels the first season of “The White Lotus.” (White ordered him not to shave it before filming began in late 2020.) The project came along during the height of the pandemic. Bartlett assumed he wasn’t going to work for a long time.
Instead, he won an Emmy for his hilarious, heartbreaking turn, and is enjoying a career renaissance after decades on the cusp. He followed “The White Lotus” with a recurring role in the fitnessworld dramedy “Physical,” opposite fellow Aussie
Rose Byrne. In January, he’s appearing in “The Last of Us,” a postapocalyptic video game adaptation from “Chernobyl” creator Craig Mazin.
He’s also flexing his tragicomic muscles in “Welcome to Chippendales,” a Hulu limited series based on the history of the male strip revue that became a cultural sensation in the 1980s. Sporting not a mustache but a
glorious cape of hair, he plays Nick De Noia, the visionary choreographer and filmmaker who shaped the Chippendales’ buffguys-in-bow-ties aesthetic and was killed in 1987 amid tensions with the company’s founder, Steve Banerjee (played by Kumail Nanjiani). It’s yet another flamboyant character Bartlett infuses with unexpected depth and subtlety.
“Suddenly, I have a lot of work and a lot of choices,” says the actor, 51. “To be in a position where I can ask questions and think more deeply about what I want to put out in the world and then be able to make choices based on that. It’s just such a beautiful thing.”
In 2019, Bartlett and his partner relocated to a property outside Provincetown, Massachusetts, near miles of woods and untouched coastline — “my fantasy,” he says. The goal was to be closer to nature and build a community with their chosen family.
Bartlett worried about having to step away from acting and find a plan B. “Then the pandemic hit, and I got this bizarre job in Hawaii out of nowhere,” he says, referring to “The White Lotus.” “The lesson for me anyway is like, when you make a choice that’s for the greater good of your life, a lot of things open up in a way that you could never imagine.”
White wasn’t familiar with Bartlett before casting him in “The White Lotus” but knew that for the story to work, viewers had to care about Armond, even as he behaved in unconscionable ways. It helped that Bartlett was “obviously attractive,” White says. “The fact that Murray is such a whatever — a hunk, a handsome man. It doesn’t make it right, it just doesn’t make it nauseating.
“Sometimes you take a chance on somebody, and then it just pays off hugely,” White adds.
Bartlett gave not only “a full-throttle comedic performance” but also brought “a deeper dimension to the character than I had even hoped,” says White.
Viewers know little about Armond’s back story, but in a scene that ultimately was cut from the series, he talks about his broken dreams of becoming an actor and getting to play all the parts. “Instead, he has just one part and it sucks — the part of the service person,” says White.
“I fully related to that,” Bartlett says. “I have watched a number of people go that route of wanting to be an actor … then it doesn’t quite work out, and they work on cruise ships.”
As for the series’ muchdiscussed poop scene, Bartlett remembers “having a really in-depth conversation with the props guy” about the exact combination of chocolate bars used to create the faux feces. “It seems sort of … bizarre to say,” he says, “but as long as there’s a purpose in the scene, I don’t mind (expletive) in a suitcase.”
“Murray is very good at playing people with both his feet on the ground.
And that’s something that I think is very underrated,” says Nanjiani, his “Welcome to Chippendales” co-star. “He is fully grounded in every single moment on-screen,” even in scenes that could veer into camp, as when Nick tells the dancers to move like they’re a tongue licking the wall.
Nanjiani, also an executive producer on “Welcome to Chippendales,” says his wife, writer Emily Gordon, had suggested Bartlett for the role “because we need someone who both men and women want to have sex with, and nobody fits the bill better than Murray.”
Nanjiani was impressed by Bartlett’s reverence for his character, a would-be
Bob Fosse who’d created an inventive, Emmy-winning children’s show, “Unicorn Tales.” Bartlett would often watch it between takes. “I think he really fell in love with the real Nick De Noia,” Nanjiani says.
Bartlett doesn’t go quite that far, but he is effusive in his praise of “Unicorn Tales.” “He was a true visionary. I was just blown away when I saw that stuff. I think it’s so beautiful. He’s sort of like this body that just can’t contain all this creative energy.”
One might say the same of Bartlett, who also has a part in “Extrapolations,” an upcoming climate-change anthology series for Apple TV+, and a full slate of travel including a trip to see family in Australia.
“I have days of terror and anxiety like the next person,” he says. “But for the most part, I’m just loving every second of it.”