Monsters: Menéndez Brothers star Cooper Koch has revealed what his reaction was when producer Ryan Murphy presented the idea for episode five of the Netflix-topping series to him.
The latest season of the TV super-producer’s true crime series Monsters centres around Erik and Lyle Menéndez, who are both serving life sentences for killing their parents in the late 1980s.
At the time, the siblings claimed they were acting in self-defence after years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, while the prosecution argued that the Menéndez brothers’ motivations were financial.
Since its release last month, the show has been hugely controversial, but has pulled in viewers for Netflix, where it hasn’t budged from the top of the platform’s most-watched shows chart.
Episode five – titled ‘The Hurt Man’ – features a 35-minute single shot of Erik (Cooper Koch) sharing the abuse he and his brother Lyle (portrayed by Nicholas Alexander Chavez) allegedly suffered at the hands of their father José and mother Kitty Menéndez prior to killing the couple.
“I cried,” Cooper told Deadline. “Ryan told me that I got the job, and then on the same day, he told me that I was gonna have that episode. And it was always planned to be that way, it was always one scene and one shot, and it didn’t really change. The script didn’t really change at all from the first time that I read it.”
He also shared that he and co-star Ari Graynor, who plays lawyer Leslie Abramson in the series only rehearsed the scene once prior to filming.
He said: “At the end everybody was very moved and everyone was crying, including myself and including Ari. (Director) Michael just looked to us and said,‘I don’t want to touch it. I just want to shoot it.’”