'Monster' week for three local actors on small screens

Denver East High grad Nicholas Alexander Chavez, who won a 2022 Daytime Emmy for playing Spencer Cassadine in the daytime TV soap opera ‘General Hospital,’ plays a leading role in the new Ryan Murphy horror-drama TV series “Grotesquerie,” which premiered Wednesday on FX and is also available for streaming on Hulu.

“Grotesquerie” is a 10-episode serial that revolves around a series of heinous crimes that have unsettled a small community – and the journalist-nun trying to solve them.

Chavez plays Father Charlie Mayhew, a character described by the show as “a priest who walks a thin line between traditional values, his progressive worldview and his desires as a passionate and virile young man.”

As a lad, Chavez was a touring member of the Colorado Children’s Chorale. As a junior at East, he quit the football team to play Atticus Finch in the school's production of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He also trained at Visionbox, a local acting studio.

More recently, he played Lyle Menéndez in Netflix’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story.”

Of starring in “Grotesquerie,” Chavez told Pink News: “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.”

Amie MacKenzie

Speaking of “Monsters,” thriving Denver stage actor Amie MacKenzie has a delicious role on one central episode in which Dominick Dunne is hosting a dinner party for a group of what MacKenzie calls “Beverly Hills Gorgons” dishing about the murder trial for the brothers who gunned down their abusive parents.

Essentially, Lane holds court throughout the scene, rattling off 17 pages of dialogue as MacKenzie and four other gorgons interject with invasive questions. MacKenzie called it a dream job sitting next to Lane for three long days, without blowing a single take. “He was as extraordinary as you'd imagine,” she said, adding, “For this character, wardrobe, hair and makeup did most of the work for me.”

And while she did not get to interact with her fellow Denverite (Chavez), she did say of Cooper Koch (as Erik Menéndez) and Chavez (as Lyle). “They are both so good in this. This is acting like I don’t even know how to talk about.”

To anyone (like me) who is not (yet) signed up for Netflix, Mackenzie said: “Pay whatever it takes to watch this show. Nicholas’ work in this is worth signing up for alone.”

Jacqueline Antaramian

Longtime Denver Center Theatre Company actor Jacqueline Antaramian plays a major role in the new, second season of the FX TV series “The Old Man,” starring John Lithgow and Jeff Bridges. It’s about a retired CIA agent who is hunted by both the agency he once worked for and his own nightmares. Antaramian plays Khadija, a woman trapped between the needs of her brother, her family and her community. Or, as Antaramian describes her: “One old gal you don’t mess with.” Also available on Hulu.