Ken Burns Answers Every Question We Have About His Hair

The great American filmmaker Ken Burns is known for many things: His oeuvre of engrossing and award-winning documentary series on topics as varied as baseball, jazz, the Shakers, national parks, and the Civil War. His eponymous panning shots and zoom effects. And, of course, his trademark bowl cut.

A New Yorker profile from a few years ago likened it to “the removable piece on the top of a Lego figure” and revealed that “in 1975, Burns had long hair, and a hairdresser cut most of it off; he still uses that hairdresser, exclusively.” A 2017 article on this very website stated, “Ken Burns's hairstyle remains unchanged throughout all of time.” In other words, Ken Burns’s hair has been a reliable and comforting constant in a world of uncertainty, and no time in recent memory has been filled with quite as much widespread uncertainty as now. But all things must change—including Ken Burns’s hair.

In recent television appearances, it’s evident that Burns has traded his close-cut bangs for lustrous flowing locks. “I was definitely not prepared for Ken Burns’s lockdown hair,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Ken Burns, welcome to team ‘hair improved by lockdown’!! We're happy to have you,” exclaimed another. While the change may come as an unexpected shock to many, it’s also true that Burns’s hair objectively looks great. 

Wanting to know more, I called up Burns, who is currently promoting his and collaborator Lynn Novick’s upcoming three-part documentary on Ernest Hemingway, premiering April 5th on PBS. The director—again, a national treasure and font of knowledge—kindly agreed to answer every question that I had exclusively about his hair.

“Never has so much hair meant so little to so many people for so long a time,” Burns told me from the start. “The very first notices I was getting with my first film on PBS, back in the early eighties, people were talking about this Beatle-haired, mop-top whatever.”

Burns confirmed that he is still going to the same hairdresser he’s been patronizing since 1975, the month after he graduated college. “The woman left and started her own business. I followed her there. I moved away from the Amherst-Northampton area. I have always returned to her. She has since retired from her business and for the last ten years has been at home, but I’ve gone to her home,” he said. Because of the pandemic, he’s only returned for a trim once in the past year.

“She cut it after it got super long in September, but I’d already exposed my forehead for the first time since the late '60s,” he explained. The longer locks haven’t required any more maintenance, however, some aspects have required getting used to: “I wake up in the middle of the night wrestling and all of a sudden I realize, I’m wrestling with my hair.” And the feedback on his new look has primarily been positive, save for when one of his four daughters jokingly told him, “Dad, you look like Steve Bannon at his arrest.”

When I asked Burns why he had kept his previous haircut for over 40 years, I received an unexpectedly poignant answer. The director has long spoken about the impact his mother's death, when he was 11 years old, has had on his work: 

“All of my life, as my late father-in-law who was a psychologist said, I’ve been waking the dead. Part of that is a really good thing: I know how to make Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln come alive for you. Obviously I’m a failure at the one that I really want, and of course that’s impossible,” he reflected. “I think the hair was just part of a connection. My hair was a Beatle cut when she died. I had had my last barbershop haircut when she was alive, and I don’t think I cut it until ‘75.” 

It wasn’t until COVID came along that his routine was disrupted. I asked him if, when this is over, he'll go back to his old haircut. “We’ll see what happens when things open up and we get back in the world,” he said. “But I’m not sure I can go back to John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Ken.”

Originally Appeared on GQ