Why HBO’s The White Lotus star Murray Bartlett credits his moustache with turning his career around and making him Hollywood’s go-to ‘hunk’
- After a stint acting on an American soap, Bartlett landed his breakthrough roles in HBO’s Looking and The White Lotus, in part due to his prolific facial hair
- The once struggling actor has since won an Emmy, featured in more shows, and has a role in the upcoming The Last of Us, and he’s ‘loving every second of it’
If there’s something to be gleaned from the arc of Murray Bartlett’s career, it may be this: never underestimate the power of a really great moustache.
A decade ago, the actor was grappling with professional doubts after a stint as a regular on the American soap opera 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, Egypt, with his then-partner, who is Egyptian. This was during the height of the Arab spring uprisings, and he grew a moustache to fit in better with the locals.
Out of the blue, he got an audition for Looking, an HBO series about a circle of gay friends living in San Francisco.
He put himself on tape from Cairo and landed the part of Dom, a sexually magnetic waiter with a retro Tom Selleck-style tash.
The quietly groundbreaking series – never a major hit – was “one of the first times where I realised that work could be like pure joy”, Bartlett says.
