Nicholas Alexander Chavez talks about “Monsters” and working with “Tour de Force” Javier Bardem

Yes, my agent sent this to me. It was an open call for proposals, meaning anyone could apply. I was really excited about it. It's been a dream of mine for a long time to work with Ryan Murphy.

I hadn't heard of the Menendez Brothers before the audition, so I tried to do as much research as I could beforehand. And then you hope you get hired so you can continue the training process, which luckily I did. But yeah, it was a selfie that I sent in, followed by a callback, and then we had a final callback that I did with Cooper where Ryan surprised us. We had no idea he would be there. But he came in and sat with Cooper and I for about 20 minutes, made us comfortable and talked to us a little bit about the script and the story and the time period. And then he led us into the lobby and said, 'Okay, I've got the guys.' Let's do this.' We went up, shot a few scenes and the rest is history.

A lot of this is Ryan's work. I mean, he's meticulous in all aspects of his production, from casting to set design to hair, makeup and wardrobe. The guy has an encyclopedic knowledge of a lot of different things, but really knows how to capture the feel of a specific time. I feel like he does quite well in this show.

There are certainly moments of levity in the series, but at its core it's about a really serious subject. I think that when you play it you have to be aware of the moment in which you are playing. And you have to stay present in the moment as a character, but also have a kind of acting intelligence that makes you ask yourself, dramaturgically, what function does what I'm doing at this moment have?

That's a great word to describe her. They are truly outstanding actors. When you go to acting school you learn that you always have to stay present. But with Javier and Chloe you can't really afford not to be there because they're so spontaneous. You have so many ideas. Their imagination and what they bring to their performance is so great. You must be ready to adapt at any time. And then you also need to develop a fine-tuned sensitivity because the differences in performance from take to take can be very different or very subtle, and you need to know how to adjust to both. To have the privilege of working in parallel and having the challenge of having to adapt in real time… It was a great honor for me.

Well, it helped that we had a really nice offscreen friendship that developed organically and over time. This was a huge opportunity and a great honor for both of us to work on this project. Just as Lyle and Erik Menendez had each other and were the only people in the entire universe who knew what the other person was going through, Cooper Koch and I had that together. It was really nice that life imitated art in this way and we could support each other.

There is plenty of courtroom TV footage of Lyle Menendez which was incredibly helpful to watch. And I felt like it was just as compelling as any of the others. However, I was very aware of the fact that people behave differently when they are in the courtroom and know that the case is being televised. When it comes to high risks such as the death penalty or life imprisonment. That's why I wanted to include that in my interpretation. When filming the courtroom scenes, I wanted to capture as accurately as possible the life I saw on the witness stand. And then when it came to everything outside of the court scenes, I used the footage that I had and tried to extrapolate that behavior and combine it with all the other things that were given to me at the time, like the scripts, the direction of our directors etc.

I feel really lucky that he entrusted me to take part in two of his projects. Working on Grotesquerie felt really special because we were able to build on the artistic relationship we had already established with Menendez. We worked together in a role where you portray real people, and then we were completely uninhibited and impulsive in Grotesquerie, where the world is straight out of Ryan's imagination. And I got to direct him in the third episode of that series, which felt incredible.

Sonically they are two very different projects, and being able to play in two extremely different sandboxes felt special.

I think more than anything, I'm really proud of the work that Cooper and I did with Javier and with Chloe and Ari (Graynor) and Nathan. And I was so excited to see what the response would be. You put so much of your life force into these projects and you can't really do anything except get excited about people seeing it and having conversations about it and forming their own interpretations.