Monsters star Nicholas Chavez says next Ryan Murphy project is ‘very different’

Nicholas Chavez, one of the stars of Ryan Murphy’s Grotesquerie and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, has said it was an honour to work with the director, despite the backlash faced by the latter show.

General Hospital star Chavez takes centre stage in Murphy’s controversial new Netflix series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, playing the older of two brothers in the fictionalised true-crime series. Out gay actor Cooper Koch plays his sibling.

In 1996, after two trials, Lyle and younger brother Erik were found guilty of shooting dead their parents, José and Kitty, in their Beverly Hills mansion in 1989.

Their pair’s defence teams fought to get the first-degree murder charge reduced to manslaughter – the brothers claimed to have been sexually abused by their father – but the moved proved futile and both were sentenced to life imprisonment without the chance of parole.

The dramatisation has come under fire in recent days, including from Erik Menendez who said it was “rooted in horrible and blatant lies”, while others felt the show inaccurately sexualised the relationship between the two brothers.

Last night, Murphy responded to Menendez’s remarks while at the premiere of his new horror-drama series, Grotesquerie, in which Chavez stars alongside Niecy Nash and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce.

Chavez plays Father Charlie Mayhew, with Nash as Lois Tryon, a detective taunted by “eerily personal” crimes in her home town. In search of answers, she recruits nun Sister Megan, but soon finds herself “in a sinister web” that raises more questions than answers.

Speaking to PinkNews and other media about Grotesquerie, Chavez addressed what it was like being “thrown into the depths” of Murphy’s often-contentious universe.

“Ryan is a world-builder and it was interesting because I got to work with him on two very, very different worlds,” he said.

“The Menendez project kind of had a context already set for it. We’re telling the story that’s based on true events that happened in 1989 [and] the early 90s, whereas [Grotesquerie] was an entirely new world where the only limitations were our creativity, our imagination.

“It was an honour and a privilege to experience both.”

Monsters and Grotesquerie were essentially filmed back-to-back, and Chavez said he had absolutely “no time” between the projects.

“One of the nicer parts about playing Father Charlie is that I could just follow my impulses and I trusted my instincts. Everyone around me enabled me to make really bold choices. With Lyle, there was intensive preparation. This one was more raw, unbridled impulse.”

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is streaming on Netflix now.

Grotesquerie will be available to watch on Wednesday (25 September) on FX in the US, and will be available to stream the next day on Hulu. It will be released on Disney+ in the near future.

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