How Bradley Whitford’s Nose Hair Ruined a Scene During His First On-Screen Role (Exclusive)

Before Bradley Whitford became known as the Emmy-winning star of The West Wing and The Handmaid’s Tale, the actor had to cut his teeth in a B-list horror movie — a project that marked his first time in front of the camera. 

“It was the first time I was ever on film,” Whitford, 65, tells PEOPLE about starring in 1985’s Dead as a Doorman. Also known as Doorman, the movie was directed by Gary Youngman and written by Youngman and Barbara Brenner. It told the story about a doorman and aspiring writer (Whitford) working at an expensive New York City apartment building when a string of murders disrupts the comfy life along Park Avenue. 

While not streaming anywhere, a trailer uploaded to YouTube offers a glimpse into Whitford’s early on-screen role at age 26 after getting his start in theater. 

“It’s not a great script, I gotta be honest,” The Diplomat actor admits before launching into a story about his time on set. “The first scene was me basically doing a monologue into a payphone. I was nervous and it was the first time in my life I’m scared. Am I gonna be able to, you know, remember the lines?”

As he recalls, “It was the first time in my life I heard, ‘Okay, quiet. We’re rolling, guys.’ And the director goes, ‘And action.’ And I start doing this monologue and I realize, ‘Oh, I can do this.’ Like, I’m not gonna forget my lines. And I start to feel suddenly not terrified, but just incredibly comfortable. It’s getting good to me and I’m throwing the phone from one hand to the other.” 

However, just as things were coming together for Whitford, there was a very unexpected stop to the scene. “Right in the middle of this movement — while I had this overwhelming feeling that I might be able to make a living at this thing I love — the camera guy goes, ‘We gotta cut. He’s got a nose hair.’ And all over the set, it’s like, ‘Brad’s got nose hair,’ ” Whitford shares. 

He adds that the “film was pretty much the full range of a roller coaster ride through the land of confidence.” 

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While Whitford jokes that younger fans may not know what a payphone is — “We’ll have to explain that to the children out there,” he says — the actor does reflect on what it’s like to perform into a phone with no one on the other end of the line. “It’s not like when you do a cellphone scene, when you usually can have that person there. We didn’t have that person there, so we had to imagine. It was weird to imagine their lines,” he says. 

The star of Netflix’s upcoming Death by Lightning then quips, “Oh my God, Dead as a Doorman. The title says it all, you know?” 

Fortunately for Whitford, he found his confidence on set and went on to have a successful TV and film career, which included a return to horror decades later in 2007’s An American Crime and 2012’s The Cabin in the Woods. He then appeared as the villainous Dean Armitage in Jordan Peele’s Get Out in 2017. 

Explaining what drew him to those projects, Whitford says he’s become more appreciative of the genre “as I’ve gotten older.” 

“When Get Out happened, Jordan is deeply in love with the horror genre and the key to it for him is something that I recognize now: horror movies are stuff you can’t talk about and there’s something underneath the theatricality of it, there’s always something really interesting and disturbing that you can’t talk about,” Whitford says. 

When it comes to Get Out, which won Peele, 46, the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in addition to being a box office hit and cultural phenomenon, Whitford says that fans always ask him, “Did you know when you were shooting it?”

“The answer to that always is no. You have absolutely no idea,” he explains. “And that was the biggest kind of surprise of my professional life. That was a $4 million movie shot in 21 days with a first-time director, so nobody had any idea it was going to sort of reset and revalidate horror.”   

Looking back at his time in horror, which also includes starring the Gushers short film FruitHead as an ambitious director of the candy’s iconic ’90s ads, Whitford has played both the victim and the villain. While both roles have their place in the genre, the actor says he prefers one over the other. “Villains are really fun. I’ve had a lot of fun playing the bad guys or guys who are in a little bit of a moral quandary. Yeah, you don’t wanna be the lead,” Whitford concludes.