Lou Ferrigno turns 75 on Monday, November 9, and the man who spent five years as the green giant on CBS’s The Incredible Hulk is still in the gym. He was born Louis Jude Ferrigno on that date in 1951 in Brooklyn, the son of a New York City police lieutenant, and long before anyone painted him green he was a quiet boy who could barely hear the kids teasing him in the schoolyard.
That boy hid inside comic books, and one of his favorites was about a mild scientist who turned into a monster when he was pushed too far. How he went from reading the Hulk to becoming him is one of the more unlikely stories in 1970s television, and the ending took him almost seventy years to reach.
What Really Caused Lou Ferrigno’s Hearing Loss?
“I had some really bad ear infections very soon after birth, and, at that time I lost some 75 or 80 percent of my hearing,” he told AudiologyOnline in 2005. Nobody caught it until he was about three, and he was wearing hearing aids by the age of four, AARP reported in 2021. “When I was fairly young, most people didn’t understand what a hearing aid was,” he told the magazine. “I knew that the only person to help myself would be me.”
The hearing loss also shaped the way he talked, and children noticed. “It’s been an uphill battle for me because when you have severe hearing loss it affects your speech, it affects everything,” he told People in 2021. He lost the fights that followed, and home was not much softer. His father wanted a tougher son, and Ferrigno remembered the warning for Nevada Public Radio in 2015: “Don’t you ever come home saying you can’t defend yourself.” Then he added something sadder. “I carry his anger and his pain.”
So he read. “I felt devastated and emotionally insecure. I would just read the comics and it would give me inspiration and hope,” he told PBS for its Pioneers of Television series. He was, he admitted to People, “obsessed with power,” and at 13 he started lifting weights so he would be strong enough to defend himself.
How Did a Kid From Brooklyn End Up Painted Green?
By 1973 Ferrigno had won the IFBB Mr. America title and the first of two straight Mr. Universe crowns. His shot at Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Mr. Olympia title became the spine of the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, and his father Matty, the man who had pushed him so hard, appeared in it too. The film made the quiet giant from Brooklyn a familiar face, and he liked what he saw. “I was in Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the docu-drama, and I liked being in front of the camera,” he told the Tulsa Beacon in 2019.
Hollywood had already cast someone else as the Hulk. Richard Kiel, the 7-foot-2 actor later known as Jaws in the James Bond films, was in the makeup when, as Ferrigno told it to SlashFilm, “a kid on the set said he wasn’t right and he needed to have big muscles like in the comics.” Ferrigno was brought in for a screen test. “I got painted green,” he said, “and I got hired.”
The job was not glamorous. The makeup “took about three-and-a-half to four hours to put on,” he told RetroFan, with a fake forehead, nose and teeth, and he had a shower built into his motor home to scrub off the green. His hearing made the physical demands of playing the Hulk harder still. “I knew I had to pay special attention because I had to constantly read lips,” he told People. One night a cable broke during a car-flipping stunt, and a tired, irritated Ferrigno flipped the car himself. “I think I really became the Hulk,” he told PBS.
What Did Bill Bixby Mean to Him?
The Hulk had no lines, and Ferrigno and Bill Bixby, who played David Banner, almost never appeared in a scene together. Even so, the veteran star of My Favorite Martian and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father took the young bodybuilder under his wing. “Bill was the best because I learned from him about professionalism,” Ferrigno told the Tulsa Beacon. “He was my mentor and was like my second father.”
For a man whose own father had been so hard on him, that phrase carried weight. Ferrigno told RetroFan that he learned by watching Bixby film his scenes and handle his dialogue. The two reunited for three Hulk TV movies between 1988 and 1990, and Bixby directed the last of them, The Death of the Incredible Hulk.
Bixby was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1991 and, as he coped with his illness through work, kept directing the NBC sitcom Blossom until the week before he died at his Los Angeles home on November 21, 1993, at age 59. When the Associated Press asked Ferrigno about his friend, his answer was short. “He didn’t want any sympathy.” More than twenty years later, when Nevada Public Radio asked him about the newer Hulk movies, he went straight back to his old friend. “It’s tough because I loved Bill Bixby,” he said.
What Changed When He Could Finally Hear?
After the series, Ferrigno played Hercules, turned up as himself in 20 episodes of The King of Queens, and became a reserve sheriff’s deputy in Los Angeles County in 2006. “Officially I’m a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County and San Luis Obispo County, but I’ve been deputized in 20 states,” he told the Tulsa Beacon. Through all of it he was still straining to catch every word.
In February 2021, at 69, he finally had cochlear implant surgery, and the world came through clearly for the first time in his adult life. “The best hearing aid in the world is not going to give me the clarity of the way I hear now,” he told AARP, before admitting the obvious. “I should have done it sooner.”
This fall he crossed off one more dream. On September 30, the former altar boy met Pope Leo XIV after a general audience in St. Peter’s Square, and he flexed for the photographers just as he had on CBS. “I’m here because it’s a lifelong dream for me to meet the pope,” he told the Associated Press. The boy who could not hear the schoolyard taunts now hears just fine, and he still answers the same way he did in 2015. “I’ve been The Hulk my whole life.”
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