"Barry" Actor Anthony Carrigan Says He Was Told His Alopecia Meant He Wasn't "Attractive" Enough To Act

If you're not watching the HBO show Barry, you really should be — it's one of the best things on television right now.

One of the standout performances in Barry is Anthony Carrigan, who plays the hilarious and endlessly quippy gangster NoHo Hank.

Carrigan also lives with alopecia areata, a disease that causes hair loss. He was diagnosed with it at 3 years old, and in an interview with People, he talked about how living with alopecia has affected his acting career.

Anthony says that, even though he pursued acting from a very young age, it wasn't until his 20s when his condition started to affect his career progression.

"There was a moment where my alopecia had progressed so much so that I had lost pretty much half [of] my scalp, both my eyebrows [and] all my eyelashes," he said. "It really threw everyone that I was working with, and no one knew what to do with me."

Anthony said that people were "scratching their heads" while trying to figure out what to do with casting him — and in some instances, he was outright rejected from Hollywood types.

"I was told by a number of people, you're not going to be able to do this," he recalled. "You're not attractive anymore. You will fail if you try to do this."

"And I'm one of those people that if you told me that I can't do something, I will. Period."

Anthony also opened up about living with alopecia as an actor, saying that it took a "series of baby steps" to truly accept himself.

"Talking about it was very therapeutic for me," he explained. "And even talking about it now, I'm strangely very grateful for this experience and how much it taught me about radical self-acceptance."

Anthony said that accepting and embracing his condition also made him a "better actor."

"I wasn't hiding anymore. I wasn't hiding under wigs, or makeup, or this projected self confidence, and instead, what was replaced was real confidence."

"We're told, you know, accept yourself, be who you are," he concluded. "But we're also in a society that's constantly telling us to change. And my take on it is: You want to feel good about yourself, and that has very little to do with what you look like. It has everything to do with expressing who you are."

Read the entire interview here.