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.”

Nicholas Chavez as Lyle Menendez, Cooper Koch as Erik Menendez in episode 202 of Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez Story.

COURTESY OF NETFLIX

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.”

Nicholas Alexander Chavez

NINO MUÑOZ/NETFLIX

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.”