NEW YORK, USA – “It’s so insane to believe that something like this could happen. Not only two kids who were 18 and 21 years old murdering their parents but also learning that parents could sexually abuse their children.”
Cooper Koch, who plays one of the brothers in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, said those words in a recent New York press conference about why audiences are riveted on this case and in true crime stories.
Ryan Murphy’s chilling tale on the real-life brothers who were convicted in 1996 for killing their parents, Jose and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, was again the most-watched Netflix series for the second week in a row, from September 23 to 29.
Two weeks after The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story debuted, LA County District George Gascon announced that his office will review new evidence and decide on resentencing.
AP reported: “‘Given today’s very different understanding of how sexual and physical abuse impacts children — both boys and girls — and the remarkable new evidence, we think resentencing is the appropriate result,’ Cliff Gardner (the brothers’ lawyer) said in an email Thursday to The Associated Press. ‘The brothers have served more than 30 years in prison. That is enough.’”
Lyle and Erik, now 56 and 53, respectively, are serving life sentences in a California state prison near San Diego.
The second season of the crime anthology series Monsters, following the success of Dahmer, stars Cooper, Nicholas Alexander Chavez (Lyle), Javier Bardem (Jose), and Chloe Sevigny (Kitty) with all four actors delivering compelling performances.
The cast of Ryan and Ian Brennan’s fictionalized retelling of the headline-making case includes Nathan Lane (as Dominick Dunne, who covered the trials for Vanity Fair) and Ari Graynor (Leslie Abramson, the criminal defense lawyer who represented the brothers).
Back to Cooper, he added about the bizarre real-life drama in Beverly Hills, “I think that you just don’t write this stuff… Both of those things are so hard to wrap your head around. And what they evoke in an audience is feeling, whether it’s empathy or anger.”
“It makes you feel something and it makes you feel passionate. That’s why people are so fascinated by it because it evokes something in you.”
Chloe also remarked on why people are gripped by true-life stories: “Life is always stranger than fiction. There’s something that people want to try and get to the root of the causes, like a lot of the questions here.”
I was a new immigrant in Los Angeles when the brothers were being tried for the murder of Jose, an entertainment executive, and Kitty. The couple was watching television at home when Lyle and Erik walked in and shot them to death. The two trials that convicted the two sons were highly sensationalized and made news around the world.
The four actors, sitting on directors’ chairs in the Warren Street Hotel in Tribeca, answered how they researched for their roles, given the abundant material the trials produced.
“I did an enormous amount of research and just really watched as much testimony as I could,” began Cooper, who, like Nicholas, got his major career break with Monsters. “I would listen to it in the car and while I was going to sleep.”
“I watched it for endless amounts of hours. It was really just a lesson in empathy for me and to understand who Erik is and why he is the way he is. It was my goal to be as authentic as possible and to just approach it with as much integrity as I could.”
Nicholas, whose credits include playing Spencer Cassadine on General Hospital, said, “There’s a tremendous amount of primary source material that you can go through. The Court TV footage as well as all of the books that were published about the Menendez brothers, from jurors. Leslie Abramson has a book.”
“So, you’re pulling from these primary and secondary source materials. But then, to the point about how the brothers are portrayed, it was an interesting thing to navigate because this show asks who the monster is.”
“I think the argument could certainly be made that one of the monsters was the media and how they portrayed the brothers during this time.”
Javier said, “In my case, there was not much out there for me to dig in. I’ve watched this little interview of 10 seconds where Jose Menendez had the chance to say two lines. And I was listening to those two lines.”
“It’s funny because once you go over and over (the lines), you understand that there’s so much we say without saying it. The way we move the eyes so I was kind of obsessed with those two lines. But there’s not much.”
“For me, there was even less on Kitty,” said Chloe. “There were a few photographs of her, but she was never on camera where you could hear her voice.”
“And because of the way that the creators constructed the story and they wanted to show it from different people’s points of view, I tried to stay loose as an actor. I knew that I had to be agile and be able to play her from different people’s perspectives.”
Javier talked about how complex it was to understand the behavior of Jose, who arrived as a penniless teenager from Cuba and prospered as an executive but had a reputation for being arrogant.
“It’s a very delicate issue,” said the actor noted for No Country for Old Men, Biutiful and Before Night Falls.
“So, what I did was just a leap of trust, just go there and work around the material. The material is really based on the roots of his (Jose’s) pain — in this case, his personal trauma.”
“And also the way he was educated back in the day when a man is a man… The toxic masculinity, we say today, which is something that can really cause lots of pain around the person who behaves that way.”
Chloe, Oscar and Golden Globe best supporting actress for Boys Don’t Cry, joined the cast, having been impressed by Dahmer.
Previously working with Ryan on American Horror Story and Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Chloe said, “I thought of the opportunity to play this damaged woman, a flawed mother, and woman who turns to the bottle, a woman who is navigating generational trauma.”
“And like Javier touched on, leaning into gender roles and what that meant for women of a certain generation. So, I thought there was a lot to unpack there.”
I asked Cooper and Nicholas how they prepared to play the brothers mentally and physically.
“It’s really just a lesson in empathy,” emphasized Cooper, who is descended from Hollywood figures — great grandfather Howard Koch (producer-director), grandfather Hawks Koch (producer), and father (Billy Koch, in visual effects).
“You have to really hear their stories, believe them, and know that what they’re saying is true.”
“Then you paint those pictures in your own mind from your own perspective, and you dig deep into your own life and you find the connective tissue.”
Nicholas replied, “For me, there is an investigatory aspect of the craft where you want to try to remain as objective and judgment-free for as long as you possibly can. We were very blessed to have access to the full Court TV footage.”
“But then again, I was also hyper-aware of the fact that people behave very differently when they are in a courtroom, when the stakes are high, when they know that the case is being televised, for instance.”
“But ultimately, more than anything else, it’s a case study in empathy. You have to search within yourself to find ways that you can relate to these brothers who went through absolutely horrific circumstances.”
As to how these actors took the essence of their real-life characters and avoided caricatures, Cooper answered first: “At least for me, I did want to make sure that I was doing some of his voice and his mannerisms. He holds his shoulders down. He’s got a lot of tension in his mouth.”
“He does the sighing. He’s always kind of tightening his lips, and that was important to me because it further justifies the fact that the sexual abuse did happen because he’s so closed off.”
Nicholas replied, “As an actor, who, what, when, and where is set out for you by the story you’re telling and the script that you’re being given. But how and why is up to you as an actor.”
“And you have to sit with those questions for a very long time so that you can determine answers that are justifiable to yourself and the other creatives involved. And so, it was important that I give that a lot of thought and attention before coming into this role.”
On the challenge of exploring the darker side of human nature, Javier commented, “I think we are all here because that’s what’s drawn us to do what we do as a job, which is to try to understand where the joy and the pain come from…”
“The way [Jose Menendez] was incapable of dealing with his own pain and how much pain and suffering that creates…. Now, we live in a time where we can talk openly about it. We can talk about abuse, mental health, toxic masculinity, machismo, and things like back in the day 30 years ago, it was unpronounceable…”
“And thank God we are in a different place. Still, we have a lot of work to do.”
Cooper was asked about filming The Hurt Man, the intense episode five, one continuous shot where he, as Erik, revealed to attorney Leslie Abrahamson the abuse—physical, sexual, and mental—that his parents inflicted on him and Lyle.
“We did eight takes,” Cooper recounted. “We did it over two days, and we did four takes (each day).”
“There were some stop-and-starts on the first day because they had to figure out the technicalities of the camera and where the bag was placed and so there were a couple of stop-starts but ultimately, there were four takes, four full takes the first day, and four full takes the second day.”
“I remember on the first day, it was the third take that was like, oh, that was it. I felt all the things and I did all, and I was, okay, that was the one. And then we did another one and I was like [makes noise].”
“Then the second day, they were all different takes, and I felt kind of great about all of them on the second day. They ended up choosing the very last take.”
Cooper added that he had a lot of time to prepare: “I had the script for a really long time. I got cast in June (2023), and when I got cast, I got sent the first five episodes. So, I carried the script around with me everywhere. I did a lot of journaling.”
“I just read the script every day. I tried to not, like, ‘memorize my lines…. And just really digging deep into the stories that he shares and just letting my imagination go free and trying to see what he’s seeing when he’s explaining and telling them… so that on the day of shooting… that they would just be real for me.”
On why people snap and turn violent, Cooper explained, “For me, it’s fear and a desire to love and to be loved that you are not getting from the people that you’re supposed to be getting it from. And secrets and just a family that doesn’t communicate and doesn’t talk about their feelings.”
“Jose Menendez was very diligent with his sons about not being able to talk about the way that they felt. It was always, you can’t cry, you can’t be emotional…. I think when you’re living under those circumstances, you become afraid. You become a shell of a person.”
“If I knew, I would share,” Javier answered a question on why people become vile. “But you (turns to Cooper) were saying fear. It is a very important strong factor, like fear of so many things that we want to attack, rather than try to understand.”
“But in the case you were saying is true, that the fact that there’s a house where expressions and emotions are not welcome or allowed, it makes for a family to explode in different directions, especially when horrible things are happening.”
Cooper remarked, “I guess the question, too, is like if you’re in fear for your life and you feel like you’re going to be killed, what do you do? I think that’s maybe the question. And maybe that’s why violence happens.”
Nicholas was asked about the challenge of playing a real-life figure like Lyle whom many people are familiar with and how much creative liberty he took.
Nicholas answered, “You do a tremendous amount of research going into playing a real person…. And I wanted to own a performance that felt holistic and multifaceted.”
“To be frank with you, I’ve sat with Lyle Menendez for over a year. I think he’s one of the most enigmatic people I’ve ever come across. And it is this enigmatic factor that I really hope to capture.”
In closing, the actors were asked what the audience will take from the nine-episode series.
“That’s the design of the show, right?” Nicholas asked aloud. “To allow everyone to form their own interpretation of what happened that night of August 20, 1989, and the events that led up to it as well as the fallout that ensued.”
“Ultimately, there are only four people in the world who know what happened and two of them are dead. And the most interesting part of this series is to see what people walk away with.”
Cooper said, “I just hope it really shines a light on mental health and child sexual abuse. And to bring awareness to the fact that it still happens and it’s a conversation that should continue to be talked about. So that people who are victims of child sexual abuse can feel seen and more comfortable to come out and speak about their experience.”
“There were no outlets for people that had experienced abuse and maybe that’s one of the reasons why the brothers didn’t feel like they could do anything. But now there are so many resources for people to come out, talk about those things, and get help. So, I hope for that.” – Rappler.com