Love it or hate it – and the answers run the gamut — “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez” was one of the largest and liveliest TV shows in 2024.

The second installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s “Monster” anthology (following the first season about Jeffrey Dahmer) takes a deep dive into the story of brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez (played by Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch), who shot and killed their parents in 1989 and told the jury they were protecting themselves after years of abuse.

After the November 10 screening of episode 1 “Blame it on the Rain” in New York, actors Chavez, Koch, Javier BardemChloë Sevigny, Nathan Lane and Ari Graynor sat down to discuss their roles and how to bring this complex story to life.

“I went into the situation with what I believe to be the truth of the situation, which is that they killed their parents out of fear,” Koch said. “They had to be ready to protect themselves in case their parents did the same thing to them, which I don’t think would ever happen, but in their minds they believed it was going to happen.

For Bardem, decades of filmmaking experience have prepared him not to rehearse too much.

“When you’re making a movie, you’re on your own,” he said. “You are at home. You imagine things for yourself. You’re all alone… and it can get very unpleasant, because then you go on set with everything you’ve done, and the set is something else. Everyone brings their homework, and you have to say: “Wait, wait, but I thought it was going to happen like this”, it’s alive. This is something you have to be willing to accept.

Koch said he learned from this spontaneity, that it gave him more freedom to go with the flow on set and see what each day’s work would bring. Bardem praised Koch and Chavez for “their commitment, their preparation, their vulnerability, their willingness to go as far as necessary…what awaits them is going to be incredible, because they deserve it.” They are great actors, but above all, they are great human beings, and that is why they are (such) good actors. And I am very proud to be one of your first steps in this process.

Chavez said he viewed Lyle Menendez as “a masked figure,” almost like a child pretending to be an adult.

“He starts the series having to imitate almost every behavior of his father,” he explained. “It’s really difficult when developmentally you feel like a 10-year-old boy and then you feel the need to present yourself as an executive of a major, successful record label, even though you don’t. I don’t have the education that goes with it. It’s interesting to see the mask slip over the course of episodes 1, 2, 3 and 4, and then finally we kind of see the child underneath.

A main visual symbol of this was the toupee that Lyle wore from episode 1, violently torn from his head by his mother Kitty (Sevigny). Later, a flashback shows Father José (Bardem) taking Lyle to have it adjusted, insisting that his son wear the hairpiece even though he has doubts.

“I always thought it was kind of like the last little piece of his authentic individuality that died that day,” Chavez said. “And then, what do you do after that?” What do you think of yourself?

Bardem and Sévigny’s research was different from others, since their characters had long disappeared before the Menendez brothers’ famous trial, conviction, and all the drama that unfolded around the brothers.

“There wasn’t much to expect, to learn from José Menendez,” Bardem said, referring to how his teammates were able to review hours of trial footage. “There was no audio, no video, there’s nothing. So I really rely on the material… I have to play José in an ambivalent way. We know for sure that he did some things, and we know nothing about others. It’s a lot of fun being an actor, not being able to go one way or the other, but being in the middle.

Bardem called José Menendez “macho”; raised with an image of masculinity that many now recognize as toxic and harmful, and with which Bardem is familiar. “I was raised to believe that and it’s something I struggle with every day in my life,” he said. “My father was the product of this upbringing. And I don’t know about here, but in Spain there are murders every month of men who kill their wives because they are super macho men, and that’s what they do, and that’s fucking disgusting. We are still prisoners of this education and we have so much to learn.

Graynor, who plays Erik’s lawyer, Leslie Abramson, joined the project without reading the scripts — only her two audition scenes.

“That’s when you first meet Leslie at the adoption agency and she meets Erik for the first time,” she recalls, noting the thread of compassion that runs through the two cases. “The show poses a nature/nurture question that I think as an actor you’re always asking yourself and trying to construct your own sense of story from that person.”

Graynor and Koch are the only two to appear in Episode 5, “The Hurt Man,” a 33-minute one-take that has been generating Emmy buzz since the day it aired. The episode exerted immense pressure on Koch as the camera slowly moves closer to his face, but the actor delivers – even if he struggled at first.

“We did a rehearsal, and it couldn’t have gone better,” Koch said. “Okay, we’re going to jump into this, and we’re going to do it, and it’s going to be great, and I’m going to start the first take, and then we’re going to stop, and then we’re not going to have to do it. do again. And the first two takes were just… oh, I felt bad about them I’m sure they weren’t that bad, but I just didn’t feel like I got it.

Koch took director Michael Uppendahl aside during the lunch break, who told him to stop “chasing the dragon” – recreating the magic of that rehearsal and the feeling it gave him. Uppendahl encouraged Koch to be open, to advocate for parents and to find light in a scenario that has no shortage of darkness.

“Then that third take was really explosive and amazing,” Koch said. “They didn’t choose that one.”

Graynor’s face is never visible when she sits across from Koch at a table, but Leslie regularly asks questions, intervenes, and offers kind words and validation for her client. Graynor said her theater training helped ground her performance even if it went outside the box.

“I find the most offensive thing a director can say to an actor is, ‘Save it for the close-up,'” she said. “It makes me so crazy because it suggests that you’re doing something only for yourself and only for the camera, which, to me, takes away the magic of what we can do, which is be with each other, creating something and being there for each other.”

Ultimately, she said, she was grateful to see Koch perform “the most difficult work I have ever participated in or seen.”

“There was so much trust, so much love and so much preparation, and then seeing what he did every time we did it – and we never stopped, we never broke down,” said Graynor added. “It was an extraordinary experience, and one of the purest artistic experiences I’ve had, in a way, maybe because there was no camera, so it was about simply to inhabit the space together.”

As Koch said, “I was your camera.” »

“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is now streaming Netflix.