Ken Burns explains why he now has luscious flowing long hair

GQ

The famed documentarian's trademark Beatles-style bowl cut, which he had for 40 years in tribute to his late mother, has always been his most prominent feature. The New Yorker once described it as "the removable piece on the top of a Lego figure." But Burns has grown his hair out amid the pandemic. “Never has so much hair meant so little to so many people for so long a time,” Burns tells GQ. “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 joked that since growing his hair out last year, his forehead has been exposed to the sun for the first time since the late 1960s. “I wake up in the middle of the night wrestling and all of a sudden I realize, I’m wrestling with my hair,” Burns jokes. He also says that his daughter told him, jokingly, “Dad, you look like Steve Bannon at his arrest.” As for whether he'll keep the long hair, Burns says: "We’ll see what happens when things open up and we get back in the world. But I’m not sure I can go back to John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Ken.”