Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch Don’t Think the Menendez Brothers Are ‘Monsters’

A week before Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story premiered on Netflix, Ryan Murphy warned a crowd at a preview screening that we were about to witness a star being born. Make that two of them.

“It’s September 12, also known as the last Wednesday before Nicholas and Cooper are super famous,” Murphy said of his Monsters stars Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch. The pair play Lyle and Erik Menendez, respectively, the brothers who are currently serving life sentences without the possibility of parole after being found guilty in 1996 of murdering their parents, Jose and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez. Murphy turned to the two young actors seated beside him and offered them a congratulatory yet foreboding message in their last moments of relative anonymity: “Enjoy it.”

Hopefully they heeded his warning. Monsters immediately became the number one show on Netflix as it courted controversy, fan frenzy, and an onslaught of opinions about how it depicted the controversial case of the Menendez brothers. The real Erik blasted the series, saying it was full of “blatant lies.” Murphy, meanwhile, defended the show and claimed it was “the best thing that has happened to the Menendez brothers in 30 years.”

Throughout it all, 25-year-old Chavez and 28-year-old Koch have been in the eye of the storm. In separate Zoom interviews, the actors attempt to articulate the wild ride they’ve been on since their portrayal of the Menendez brothers went public.

“I was speaking with some Netflix personnel before Monsters came out, and they said, ‘This is going to go live in 190 different countries at once,’” Chavez tells VF. “I was like, Wow, the enormity of that is really difficult to grasp.”

“I feel like the same person,” Koch tells me of his life post-Monsters. “The only thing that’s different is we did a big TV show and everyone’s talking about it. There’s been some overwhelming feelings, exciting feelings, scared feelings, happy feelings. It’s all the things.”

Chavez and Koch took very different paths to Monsters. Born in Houston at the turn of the millennium, Chavez spent most of his childhood in Denver doing typical boy stuff—playing football, snowboarding. It wasn’t until he spent a summer at Camp Rising Sun, a full-scholarship international leadership program for teens, that he was introduced to theater. “This guy from Egypt, Marwan, who’s now my best friend, directed me in Into the Woods and cast me as the cow,” he says. “I remember being so nervous that all of the girls were coming over to the boys camp to see the play, and I was dressed up like a cow.”

Koch, too, had his first brush with acting as a child, albeit in a very different way. He grew up in Woodland Hills, California, a suburb of Los Angeles akin to Calabasas; his mother put him and his twin brother in community theater at age five. “My brother and I had a manager for a second, and we went on auditions for commercials and some film and TV, but we had to keep getting pulled out of school,” he says. “We really didn’t like that.” While child stardom wasn’t in the cards for Koch, a love of theater, particularly musical theater bloomed. “I grew up doing musicals,” he said. “I really liked Sondheim, so Into the Woods and West Side Story.”

Chavez capitalized on his small but mighty role as Milky White the cow by joining his high school’s speech and debate team, and soon found himself stepping into the role of Atticus Finch in his high school’s production of To Kill a Mockingbird after the original lead got sick. With the encouragement of his teachers, he auditioned for drama schools, and attended one for two years before striking out on his own. “My first attempt at the real world got hit with a global pandemic,” said Chavez. He took on odd jobs—selling life insurance and cars—to get by. “If there’s a product under the sun, I probably sold it at one point or another,” he says.

Koch also felt the sting of rejection at the onset of adulthood. “I auditioned for all the musical theater schools,” said Koch. “I thought, I’m going to be a musical theater guy. I want to be on Broadway.” The world had other plans: “I didn’t get into one school for musical theater.” He did, however, get into Pace University in downtown Manhattan. “I absolutely loved it,” he says. “It just really taught me how to be myself.”

Gradually, both Chavez and Koch became working actors. Chavez did two years on General Hospital, earning a 2022 Daytime Emmy in the process. Koch found work as a model and an indie film actor, starring in smaller films like Swallowed and the queer slasher flick They/Them. When a casting call for Monsters went around, they both submitted tapes, hoping for the best but expecting nothing.

Although Murphy and Monsters cocreator Ian Brennan saw hundreds of submissions, the relatively unknown Koch and Chavez stood out. “As soon as we saw their auditions, I felt, as I think Ian did, ‘Okay, these are the guys,’” Murphy said during the Q&A. “Usually when you have huge parts like this, you see four, five, six people.” But Murphy had already seen enough. “We said to Nicholas and Cooper, ‘Come in for an audition.’ They didn’t know that they were the first and only choice.”

Koch and Chavez met for the first time when they arrived at Murphy’s office. “Even in the screen test, there just already was this sort of innate chemistry between us,” Koch says. That would be crucial to get them through the grueling monthslong process of shooting the series.

“Cooper is incredibly charismatic,” Chavez says. “I can be very, very intense, and I can be very obsessive. He did such an amazing job of centering us both, honestly. Taking a moment at the end of the workday to just look around and appreciate all of the incredible things happening around us, the people that we got to work with. He often would just come over and give me a big hug. We often told each other that we were proud of the other person, and we really meant it. This was hard work to do. It’s a crazy experience to go through. I think both of us felt really lucky. At least, I felt really lucky to go through it with someone else.”

Koch shared a similar sentiment when asked about working with Chavez. “It’s not like we’re doing a comedy here. This stuff is really intense,” says Koch. “When you’re doing stuff that’s super intense and emotional, you naturally sort of come together.”

Chavez and Koch share the mammoth responsibility of anchoring Monsters as it dives headfirst into deeply upsetting territory. The show explores the brothers’ claim that they were psychologically, emotionally, and sexually abused at the hands of their parents, particularly their father—something both brothers maintain to this day.

After meticulous research, Koch and Chavez found different physical aspects they could use to tap into their characters. For Koch, it was the younger Menendez’s tendency to overemphasize his T’s, carefully articulating them at the ends of certain words. “He does really do an aspirated T,” Koch says. “He really purses his lips. He sighs a lot. His shoulders are always very far forward. He’s very shy. He’s very closed-off, very tense in the mouth.”

In Koch’s opinion, these traits are all physical manifestations of Erik’s trauma. “All of those things are behaviors that further support the claim that he was sexually abused by his father,” Koch says. “There’s YouTube videos of behavioral analysts who analyze physical behavior and body language, and they tell you these are things that people develop after they’ve been sexually abused.”

Chavez was compelled by what was hiding underneath the glossy exterior of the Menendez family. So naturally, Lyle’s reported $1,450 toupee became something of a totem for him. “The hairpiece, to me, almost became symbolic of the mask that was imposed on Lyle by his family and by his father.”

Koch does not mince words when sharing his opinion on the brothers’ claims against their father. “I believe both of them,” he says. “I believe everything that they said on the stand to be true.” His costar, however, is more hesitant. “I came to a really unique conclusion, but I’ve also come to the conclusion that I don’t really want to share what that is with anyone, and that I really want to keep that part of my artistry and my interpretation to myself,” says Chavez.

The stars’ approach to the actual Menendez brothers diverged further when Koch (and Kim Kardashian) took a trip to the facility where Lyle and Erik are incarcerated. There, he and Kardashian met Lyle and Erik, along with other inmates. According to Koch, the September trip happened spur-of-the-moment and was catalyzed by his stylist, Jamie Mizrahi, who happened to be out to lunch with Kardashian. Mizrahi FaceTimed Koch, then put the reality star on the phone. “I’m on FaceTime with Kim, and she’s asking me all these questions,” says Koch. Then Kardashian told him she and Scott Budnick, a producer and criminal-justice-reform activist, were planning to visit Erik and Lyle’s prison. She asked if Koch would like to come as well. Koch had previously spoken to Lyle a few times, but had yet to hear from Erik. For him the answer was clear: “I was like, yes.”

Chavez, though, did not make the trip down to the correction facility. “I was not made aware that there was a trip to see the brothers,” he says. But even if the offer had been extended, he would have declined. “A big part of being an artist, at least in my view, is having the grace to go into a character or go into a role and then also release it when you’re done with it,” he says. He takes a second to carefully consider his words. “I think a big part of the next phase of my artistry is recognizing when it’s time to release the role, and my decision to not want to make those visits is part of that.”

Despite Erik Menendez’s opinion about the series, “he seemed okay” when Koch met him, the actor says. “The first thing he said was, ‘I’ve heard nothing but great things about you and about episode five, and that you’re going to win an Emmy. And I hope that you do.’ He was very, very sweet about that, and he said he would watch it eventually. He needs to take his time.” Ultimately, Koch understands how difficult this moment must be for both brothers, and appreciates why Erik had a negative reaction to the series ahead of its debut. “It makes sense that he would feel that way,” he says. “This is the worst part of his life being televised for millions of people to see, and not to mention in this dramatized, fictionalized, Hollywood TV way. I get how he feels, and I stand by him.”

The day ended with Koch embracing both brothers. “I got to give them a hug and look them in the eyes and just tell them that I believe them and I stand with them, and I’ll do everything I can to advocate for them.”

That advocacy may come in handy. On October 3, Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón announced that his office would review the Menendez brothers’ case after the discovery of new evidence, including former Menudo member Roy Rosselló’s sworn affidavit alleging that he was sexually assaulted by Jose Menendez—as well as a 1988 letter Erik Menendez wrote to his cousin that discussed his father’s alleged sexual abuse. “I have now decided we will go through a thorough process of investigating both the new evidence for habeas and whether they have been rehabilitated for resentencing,” Gascón told Newsweek.

While Monsters arguably may have contributed to a reevaluation of the case, there are still many vocal detractors of the series who take issue with its portrayal of the Menendez brothers. One specific point of contention is Monsters’ suggestion that Vanity Fair reporter Dominick Dunne, played by Nathan Lane, hypothesized that the brothers may have been in an incestuous relationship with each other and killed their parents to cover it up. (Dunne never published that theory in his reporting for Vanity Fair.)

“People like to take the small bits of the incestuous stuff or other people’s perspectives that they disagree with, and like to say that we’re painting out the show for that to be the truth,” says Koch. “But there’s so many different truths in this show. You can align with the one that you feel the most compatible with, and the one that you feel is right.”

Both brand-new to the fame game, Chavez and Koch are trying to process the public’s reaction to their work without letting it affect them too much. “I imagined that the show would be interpreted in many different ways, and that there would not be one singular positive or negative sentiment about the show,” Chavez says. “This show deals with really, really sensitive subject matter, and these boys evoke such a strong empathy out of people, so much so that we’re still talking about it 30 years later. I understand why the reaction has been as intense and as outspoken as it has been.”

Koch, for the record, is also at peace with the public’s perception. “I feel really calm,” he says. “And I know where I stand. I know what my point of view is, and that point of view aligns with all of the people on TikTok who support them. I know that I did everything that I could to support them and advocate for them in my performance, and portray them as authentically as possible. And if people are criticizing it, I know that I did everything I could.”

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