After spending four episodes unpacking the troubled lives of Lyle and Erik Menendez, Netflix’s “Monsters” undergoes an intense shift in style in its fifth episode.
Titled “The Hurt Man,” the 33-minute installment plays out in a single take as Erik (Cooper Koch) gives a detailed, emotional account of the childhood abuse that he suffered. Erik’s speech comes after he and his brother have been detained for the murder of their parents Jose and Kitty (Javier Bardem and Chloe Sevigny), during a conversation with his lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor).
It’s a striking divergence for the series, bifurcating its nine-episode season with a conspicuously shorter episode that gives Erik an uninterrupted spotlight to articulate the darkness at the heart of the story — but also strands him from the support of his older brother, Lyle (Nicholas Chavez). In her review of the series, Variety TV critic Aramide Tinubu called “The Hurt Man” a “standout” of the series, and the culmination of an “excellent” first half of the story.
With no cuts or edits in the episode, and the character of Abramson only seen from behind, “Monsters” rests on Koch’s shoulders for those 36 minutes.
“We shot it eight times — four times a day for two days,” Graynor said. “We were scheduled to have a bunch of rehearsal. Cooper and I had run it a a few times on our own, just to do it out loud, and then we did it in rehearsal. I think we had both spent so much time preparing and cared so deeply about it that we got in the room and we did it once and Michael Uppendahl, our incredible director, said, ‘Let’s not rehearse it, let’s just shoot it.’”
Koch recalled the rehearsal: “It was so beautiful. It went better than I could have imagined.”
However, he wasn’t feeling the same when they shot the first two takes. “I went over to Michael and said, ‘I need some help. I got to figure out why I’m not unlocking it, or what I’m not gettin,’” Koch remembers. “And he says, ‘You’re chasing the dragon, you’re chasing the dragon of that first rehearsal. So go into the next one and just be open to Ari. Be open to what she’s gonna say. Find light in everything that you can and try to defend your parents.’ That really just opened everything up. I felt amazing after the third take.”
The eighth and final take is the one featured in the episode. “Watching [Cooper] do that was extraordinary, and we got through it every time. We never stopped, there weren’t mess-ups,” Graynor said. “It was totally different every time. I think we both knew what an incredible gift it was as actors, and also that episode was so much bigger than us. We just really wanted to hold the space for Erik’s story and for me, as Leslie, to model that kind of listening and love that I think she gives to him.”
Koch became emotional talking about working with Graynor. “The fact that you don’t see her face, you just hear her voice, and she carries him through the whole thing and holds space for him, Ari is just so generous with her performances,” he said, wiping tears from his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This happens every time I talk about her.”
Murphy said he and co-creator Ian Brennan were committed to letting Erik tell his side of the story. “Everything he does say in there was either based on things that he had said, written, talked about, wrote transcripts, et cetera, so it was very true to his point of view,” he explained. “When we were writing it, I thought that the most powerful way to do this would be able to do it in one shot so that you could not look away. You just could not look away.”
Murphy said “you could hear a pin drop” while they were shooting the takes. He praised Graynor’s performance as “incredible back acting.”
“They were both so committed to what they were talking about and giving victims of sexual abuse their day in court, so to speak,” he said.
Shortly after the series premiered on Netflix, Erik blasted “Monsters” and Murphy for the show’s “ruinous character portrayals” of himself and his brother. The siblings are currently serving life sentences at the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, Calif., after being convicted in 1996 for the murder of their parents.
In his interview with Variety, Murphy defended the series, saying that the show is “the best thing that has happened” to the brothers in “30 years.”
Koch met the brothers after the series premiered during a prison visit with Kim Kardashian. He believes the brothers deserve a retrial: “I really do hope that they are able to get paroled and have an amazing rest of their lives.”