You wonder a lot about control, anger, and tragedy throughout Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. When you first tune into the second season of this Ryan Murphy limited series, you think you are going to see a tale of how two brothers killed their parents in cold blood, but this examination goes far beyond the media frenzy around the case. By shifting our perspective to the toxicity inside the Menendez house, we are presented with unimaginable horrors. Nicolas Alexander Chavez, as Lyle Mendendez, delivers a star-making turn, a performance of a lost, lonely boy who only lets you see his true self when his meticulously-crafted façade slips.
Chavez’s burst on the scene last year was a double whammy. In Monsters, he embodies a real person in the type of series that we expect from Murphy: heavily researched and carefully crafted. Just a few weeks later, Chavez made a second splash in Grotesquerie, an over-the-top, horny soap opera of a horror show as a priest with a secret.
“They came out within seven days of each other, I think,” Chavez says. “Monsters came out in mid-September, and the first episode of Grotesquerie came out something like seven days later. Something interesting that I’ve experiences is that in Europe people almost exclusively come up to me about Grotesquerie whereas, in the United States, it tends to be more about Monsters.”
With both shows entering our social consciousness at the same time, it’s expected to wonder about forces of darkness versus a discovery of truth or good versus evil. The more you peel back the layers, in the various perspectives, of Monsters, the more you are flipped on your head. Chavez explains that it’s not as black-and-white as we would like it to be.
“The conversation tends to land on a gray area,” he says. “And that it’s subjective. There are people, though, that think evil is objective, and it’s too broad or nebulous a concept in order to pin it down into one of those camps because it’s really both. In today’s day and age, we want to be able to make very, very quick judgements about those kinds of things–we like to think of things being one or the other, don’t we? Like the serial killer in Grotesquerie, it’s not always that black-and-white. That’s why, I think, Monsters was so interesting because it showed the crime from so many different perspectives, and there’s a lot of really heinous people involved. We talk a lot about the parents, and I think that there are a lot of really evil actions that took place. It doesn’t just stop with the parents is the reality of it? We can find answers and some of those can be very literal and some are esoteric.”
For a lot of younger audiences, the case against Lyle and Erik will be new, but many of us remember the reverberations of the courtroom drama itself. If you speak to someone in, say, their twenties about what the show depicts, it would be quite different from a conversation with someone in their fifties or sixties.
“Most of the reactions that came to me were from people around my age,” Chavez says. “I heard a little bit from folks that were around during that time who thought it was interesting that Monsters repositioned the story in a way that they weren’t familiar with. The media really made it into one things, so for them tobe able to see it as nine different things across nine episodes challenged some of what they thought before.”
We chatted briefly about how the perspective of the story is built from the viewpoint of people on the inside. It shapes the narrative in a completely unique way.
“No actor was exempt from that challenge,” he says. “Sometimes I would have to play Lyle through Jose’s perspective or Kitty’s perspective. We were all cognizant of building that into our performances.”
You think a lot about how we react to things as the story unfolds, and we might notice that Lyle is quick to anger. Do we ever contemplate, though, that how this young man reacts to things is a product of how much he has been forced to keep things in emotionally? I don’t think we do. We just assume that his family’s wealth and privilege adds up to impatience or impertinence, but the more we watch, the more we come to understand how much Lyle is hiding from the world. Combine that with what is expected of him and how society squashes any sympathy for male sexual assault victims (or victims in general), you might understand how Lyle jumps to that want and need of control.
“One of the things that I talked about with people close to me as we were filming was that anger is not a primary emotion,” Chavez says. “It’s what you feel instead of feeling the things you actually feel, and so you have to answer for yourself, ‘Why can I feel what is real? Why can’t I process what I am actually going through?’ For me, the second that you kill your parents, you have to live in the furture, and you have to live in the best possible version of that future. Sitting with the present is entirely far too difficult, and this is made apparent from the very, very first scene of the show where Cooper [Koch] and I are riding in the limo. Erik is in the present as they go towards the memorial service, but Lyle is talking about TCBY and his shoes–he can’t live in the present. It’s the mask of Lyle, and it’s the avoidant nature of how he is. Lyle is a very commandeering person, and he’s going to take command of the situation. He will capitalize on opportunity as he sees fit, and he will minimize risk in the way that he thinks risk minimalization should be.
When I speak about the character, I am also speaking on how the script was written and the dramaturgy of the script. When we interpret characters, we’re doing so as part of a team with writers, directors, and other actors to try and create a piece that is larger than life and not a documentary. Lyle’s anger was very scary, sure, and there were some very intense moments in filming. There is a difficultuy that comes with not being able to address what’s actually going on with you, and I feel like I don’t talk about this enough. It’s sounds crazy to say, but Erik has the gift of being able to process his emotions in semi-real time to be present with what he is feeling. For Lyle to put that off for as long as he does and then have his mask fall down in front of the world and in front of a jury of his peers, it’s, in my mind, a greater paradigm shift. Stuff has to come out. You’re put in a life and death situation.”
When Lyle steps onto the stand, the camera is right in Chavez’s face. There’s nowhere for Lyle to run as he expels emotion and emotion. He has held onto these horrors for so many years, but watch how Chavez’s face breaks throughout the scene. It’s like a rush of a river bursting through rocks. Once the chasms opens, you cannot put it back together.
“The writers wrote really interesting technical spects to the script for both Lyle and Erik,” he says. “With episode five, the camera presses in on him, and it’s brilliant. In the script [of seven], they wrote ‘a slip of the mask.’ At the front of the show, we see a young man who is very charismatic, very directionally where he wants to take everything, and is very in control of himself and the situations he puts himself in. But then we turn him into a crumpled up, tiny little boy at the end of the series, and I just felt myself arcing longer. That’s what the first several episodes really are for Lyle–it’s about hiding–before you get moments of peeking through into who he is and what he went through and the weight that he bears.”
Monsters: The Lyke and Erik Menendez Story is streaming now on Netflix.
