I watched a lot of Douglas Fairbanks movies. He always played the same role with a mustache. Zorro had a mustache. The Musketeer had a mustache. Tarzan had a mustache.
I remember when I interviewed at MSNBC, one of the first things they said to me was, 'In your tapes, you had a mustache, right?' I said, 'Yeah, I recently took it off.' I said, 'If you hire me, you get to decide if you want it or not.' They said, 'No, no, we're fine with it now.'
You're basically competing with the same exact product. Coke and Pepsi are at least in different cans. Lyft and Uber drivers are just swapping out the mustache for the U on the dashboard, depending on which one they're getting the call on.
When I went to the Olympics, I had every intention of shaving the mustache off, but I realized I was getting so many comments about it - and everybody was talking about it - that I decided to keep it.
The difficult part of writing about someone you don't admire is that it's easy to demonize them. What you get then is a cackling villain, twirling their mustache at every dastardly deed they commit.
Having a mustache and never smiling became a permanent component of my persona through the quaintly self-important decade of the seventies.
I would quite like to play a big concert as Freddie Mercury. I can't sing that great and I haven't yet found a use for the over large size of my teeth. I quite fancy a mustache like that and he was such a great showman.
Eddie Drake is sort of this loose cannon, funny, edgy guy, who has this really foolish, foolish mustache.
The mustache represented the old John; I didn't want to be that guy anymore, so I shaved it off. It was ritualistic in a way.