When Cooper Koch finally played Erik Menendez in Netflix’s “Monsters,” it was a true full-circle moment for the actor, who has literally been auditioning to play the part for eight years.
“My second audition ever was for the ‘Law & Order’ series about them in 2017,” Koch said in his Variety Actors on Actors interview with Sam Nivola. “And then I also had an audition for the Lifetime movie that they were doing the same year. I just felt this insane cosmic thing that was like, ‘I have to play this part.’ And this immense empathy.”
California-native Koch even went to the same Calabasas high school that Menendez attended before moving to Beverly Hills.
“There are all these weird parallels,” he said.
Erik and his brother Lyle Menendez were convicted in 1995 of the 1989 murder of their parents, Kitty and José, in the living room of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion. Koch developed a relationship with his real-life counterpart after “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” was released last fall, after visiting Erik in jail.
“I still care so deeply about both of them. They’re going to parole board in June; that looks very positive,” he said (the brothers’ parole hearing date has been postponed to August since the interview was conducted).
In preparing for the role, Koch said that he studied recordings of Menendez constantly.
“I listened to him every night before I went to bed. I had him on in the car when I was driving,” he recalled. “I really did want to get his voice and mannerisms, because they all further support that he was being sexually abused by his father. I know there’s so many perspectives, but I always wanted the audience to sympathize with him.”
Koch, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance in the series, has received much attention for a 33-minute one-take episode in which Koch’s Erik describes his father’s alleged patterns of sexual abuse in excoriating detail. The episode, which sees his lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor) gently prodding her client, starts in a medium shot of Koch and ever-so-slowly tracks in a tight close up.
“I had eight months with it, so I just read it every day, and I would visualize what he was saying and create those images so clearly, so that when we went to do it, it would emotionally affect me,” Koch explained. “We did eight takes, four on the first day, four on the second day, and they chose the very last one … I had a really long time with it, and it was the backbone of my whole character. That was my backstory; I didn’t have to write one. They wrote it for me.”
