Nicholas Alexander Chavez opens up about ‘Monsters’ and working with ‘tour de force’ Javier Bardem

Yeah, my agent sent me this. It was an open call, meaning that anyone could audition for it. I was really excited by it. It's been a dream of mine to work with Ryan Murphy for a long time. 

I hadn't heard of the Menendez Brothers prior to receiving the audition, so I tried to do as much research as I possibly could leading up to that. And then you hope that you get hired so that you can continue the education process, which thankfully I did. But yeah it was a self-tape that I sent in, followed by a callback, and then we had a final call back that I did with Cooper where Ryan surprised us. We had no idea he was going to be there. But he walked in and he sat down with Cooper and me for about 20 minutes, made sure that we felt comfortable, and talked to us a little bit about the script, about the story, about the time period. And then he walked us out into the lobby and said ‘Okay, I have the boys. Let’s do this.’ We went upstairs, did a few scenes and the rest is history. 

A lot of that is Ryan's doing. I mean, he's meticulous with all aspects of his production, from casting to set design to hair and makeup and wardrobe. The guy has an encyclopedic knowledge of many different things but really knows how to capture the feel of a specific time. I feel like he does quite well in this show.  

There are certainly moments of levity within the show but at its core, it deals with some really serious subject matter. I think that you have to be aware of the moment that you're playing when you're playing it. And you have to stay present in the moment as the character, but also have a kind of actor intelligence about you where… dramaturgically you ask yourself what is the function of what I’m doing in this moment.

That's a great word to describe them. They're such tour de force actors. When you go to acting school they teach you that you always have to remain present. But with Javier and Chloe, you actually can't afford not to be present because they're so spontaneous. They have so many ideas. Their imagination and what they're bringing to their performance is so deep. You need to be willing to adjust on a dime, in the moment. And then you also need to develop a finely tuned sensitivity because the differences in their performances from take to take may be very different, or they might be very subtle, and you need to know how to adjust to both. To have the privilege to work across from that and to be given the challenge of having to adapt in real-time… It was a great honor for me.

Well, it helped that we had a really nice offscreen friendship, which developed organically and over time. This was a massive opportunity for both of us and a massive honor to work on this project. In the same way that Lyle and Erik Menendez had each other and they were the only people in the entire universe who knew what the other person was going through, Cooper Koch and I had that with each other. It was really nice that life imitated art in that way and that we could support each other.

There's plenty of court TV footage of Lyle Menendez, which was incredibly helpful to watch. And I felt that it was gripping in the way that everybody else did. That said, I was hyper-aware of the fact that people behave differently when they’re in a courtroom and they know the case is being televised. When there are high stakes such as the death penalty or life imprisonment. So I wanted to factor that into my interpretation as well. When it came to filming the court scenes, I wanted to, as accurately as possible, portray the life that I saw on the stand. And then when it came to everything outside of the court scenes, I used the footage that I had and tried to extrapolate that behavior and combine it with all the other things that I was being given at the time, such as the scripts, the direction from our directors, etc. 

I feel really lucky that he trusted me to participate in two of his projects. Working on "Grotesquerie" felt really special because we were able to build on the artistic rapport that we had already established with "Menendez." We had worked together in one capacity where you’re portraying real-life people and then we were completely uninhibited and impulsive in "Grotesquerie," where the world is straight from Ryan’s imagination. And I got to be directed by him in episode three of that series, which felt incredible.

They’re, tonally speaking, two very different projects, and being given the ability to play in two extremely different sandboxes felt special.

I think more than anything I'm really proud of the work that Cooper and I did on this with Javier and with Chloe and Ari [Graynor] and Nathan. And I've been so excited to see what the response is. You put so much of your life force into these projects and can't really do anything except be excited for people to watch it and for them to have conversations about it and form their own interpretations.