Monsters’ Nicholas Alexander Chavez Takes a Swing at Sharing His Thoughts on Lyle Menendez, Erik’s Objections and the Brothers’ Guilt

Ask anyone who has streamed Netflix’s Monsters : The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story , and they’ll tell you: Season 2 of Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology series stirs up capital-F Feelings. With regard to Lyle, who with younger brother Erik is serving life without the possibility of parole for the murders of their parents, that feeling toggles wildly between sympathy and loathing. What was Nicholas Alexander Chavez’s take on him?

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“When you’re playing a character like this, you want to remove as much judgment as you can and empathize as much as you can,” the Daytime Emmy-winning General Hospital veteran tells TVLine. “That’s what I tried to do first and foremost… I wanted to come from as educated a perspective as I could, so I familiarized myself with plenty of primary and secondary sources as far as research material. I went through the Court TV footage quite a bit.

“Ultimately, I understand that some of the behavior that he has in this show is difficult for people to digest,” he continues, “but my performance sits at the nexus of so many things. It sits at the nexus of the research I have done, the scripts I was given, the direction that I was given and the strong interpretation and point of view that I formed of this person who is, in my view, one of the most enigmatic human beings to have lived in the last 100 years.”

Watching Monsters , it at times seemed like we were seeing two different Lyles, one utterly destroyed by his father and mother’s abuse and the other, a privileged enfant terrible. But “I didn’t feel like I was playing two people,” Chavez says. “I felt as if I was playing one person who was multi-faceted and had many strengths and many weaknesses and different colors to his humanity. And he had different ways of coping with different aspects of his life.

“I think you’d have real trouble making sense of it all,” he adds. “I once heard that complex characters are 80 percent one thing and 20 percent the opposite thing.” That certainly holds true for Lyle.

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What with not living under a rock and all, Chavez has, of course, heard about Erik’s condemnation of Monsters . “Of course it’s affected me, and I empathize with Erik and Lyle Menendez,” the actor says. “I can only imagine how difficult it must be to have the most traumatic moment of your life played on the screen in front of millions of people.”

In the end, having so thoroughly studied the case, would Chavez have found the brothers guilty… or, because of the extenuating circumstances, innocent? “That’s a really interesting question. When I took on this role, I had to develop a really strong point of view with this character,” he says. “And this point of view came after watching the trial over and over and over again. So I do have an answer to this question, but I think it’s really important to me that I not share it.”

After watching Monsters , what’s your take? Would you have found the Menendez brothers guilty?

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