Nicholas Alexander Chavez is standing on the cusp of change. The 25-year-old actor is entering a new stage in his career, coming off of working on two shows with Ryan Murphy, one of the most decorated and revered TV showrunners in the industry. Chavez and Cooper Koch are the leads of Netflix's “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” a series exploring the real-life crime story of the brothers who shockingly shot their parents in their living room.
Chavez is not new to TV but his turn in “Monsters” is star-making and challenging, introducing him to millions of viewers while promising an exciting career. He also gets the chance to share the screen with icons like Javier Bardem, Chloe Sevigny, Nathan Lane, and more.
Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez
The impact of the series has likely been felt by anyone who spends some time online. "Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story" quickly became one of Netflix’s most-watched shows, acquiring over 32 million views as of this writing. Twitter and TikTok have been crawling with fan-made footage of Chavez and Koch, with many viewers opting to rediscover the shocking case of Lyle and Erik, which now has its own documentary on Netflix.
Chavez caught up with HOLA! following the release of the series as he readies for an intense couple of months, seeing the release of “Monsters” and "Grotesquerie,” another Ryan Murphy project. Through our chat we discussed the life-changing opportunity of working with Murphy through various projects and the challenges and perks of sharing the screen with actors like Bardem and Sevigny.
I wanted to ask a bit about the audition process. This is a huge show with the name Ryan Murphy attached to it so I imagine it was a complex process, with many steps. Can you talk to me a bit about that?
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.
The show is set in the nineties and the attention to detail is incredible. What was it like to step into that set and be transported in time?
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.
Javier Bardem, Koch, Chavez, and Chloe Sevigny
I also wanted to talk about the tone of the series, which balances serious topics with campy and even comedic beats. How was that managed?
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.
What was it like to share such intense scenes with actors like Javier Bardem and Chloe Sevigny who are known for their magnetic onscreen presences?
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.
Your dynamic with Cooper is so important. The show lives and dies on the relationship between your characters. How was that balanced?
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.
Nicholas Alexander Chavez
You're playing a character that's based on a real person and there's all of this footage of him. Did that impact your performance?
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.
You're making another show with Ryan Murphy. How did that dynamic evolve now that you’ve done two projects together?
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.
Nicholas Alexander Chavez
Now that ‘Monsters’ premiered and it's streaming, do you feel a sense of relief or maybe fear about people’s reception?
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.
Watch Nicholas Alexander Chavez talk about his role in Monsters ,type=downsize)