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Getting into the mind of Lyle Menéndez is no simple task.
Nicholas Alexander Chavez speaks from experience: he recently tackled the role of the convicted killer for Ryan Murphy‘s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story. So how did he overcome the challenges of playing a real-life public figure?
“Well, I always wondered what it might be like to kill my parents,” Chavez joked during Entertainment Weekly‘s Breaking Big panel at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Savannah Film Festival. “No, that’s of course not true.”
But while the audience laughed on, he couldn’t help but quip again: “I had a lovely family — I have a lovely family. For now.”
Miles Crist/Netflix
Getting serious, Chavez shared that in his opinion, “it’s incredibly hard playing a real person.” A huge part of the challenge for him and costar Cooper Koch — who stars as Lyle’s brother and partner in crime, Erik Menéndez — was simply wading through the existing footage and analysis of the show’s subjects.
“It’s hard to sift through all the different kinds of research, and you really want to be cognizant of the research type while you’re looking at it,” Chavez said. “There were a lot of documentaries that were made about the Menéndez brothers, but the most footage that exists of them is the court TV footage.”
He explained, “I think what’s really, really interesting about that is that they’re on trial and they’re facing the death penalty and life in prison. And as acting students, you’ve learned about stakes and we have changes of self, of course: the way that we behave in some situations is different than we behave in other situations. And so when I watched that footage, I had to be really, really cognizant of what the circumstance was and the different incentives for behavior — which is not to say that their story was not real or genuine, but you do have to factor in the full picture.”
Chavez added that it was also crucial to keep in mind the context of the project he was starring in: “You’re not just doing the Menéndez Brothers, you’re doing Ryan Murphy does the Menéndez Brothers.”
Following the Netflix show’s massive success — and the streamer’s subsequent true-crime documentary The Menéndez Brothers — Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón announced in October that he will recommend a resentencing of the Menéndez brothers that would make them eligible for immediate parole. “I believe that they have paid their debt to society,” Gascón said.
Courtesy Netflix
While the brothers have been the subject of various other documentaries and true crime deep dives, Chavez previously told EW that landing the part of Lyle was his introduction to the Menéndez Brothers story.
“I wasn’t familiar with anything,” Chavez said at the show’s September premiere. “I actually had not heard of the Menéndez Brothers.”
The 25-year-old actor then pointed out that he certainly didn’t have firsthand memories of the Menéndez siblings’ notoriety, since their 1989 crime took place a full decade before his birth. “I wasn’t even alive when this happened,” he said. “As soon as I got the audition, I immediately called the people who I knew and loved who were alive during that time, and I asked them what they knew about it and what their impressions of it were, and that was actually really interesting information to get.”
He then committed himself to “an extensive amount of research” and ended up discovering Lyle as “a really compelling and complicated character.”
