Over the course of her three-decade career, Chloë Sevigny has built an eclectic résumé playing complex women whom she describes as “the moral compass” or “the salt of the earth” in a story.
But in the second season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s “Monsters,” which reexamines the story of the Menendez family for a new generation, Sevigny plays the role of victim and villain in equal measure. An unflinching exploration of abuse and privilege, the Netflix limited series reconsiders the lives of Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik Menendez (Cooper Koch), who were convicted in the 1989 killing of their wealthy parents, José (Javier Bardem) and Mary Louise a.k.a. Kitty (Sevigny).
“The most challenging part was that each episode was a different person’s idea of her, so I had to switch gears as to who I think she was to serve the way that they were telling the story,” Sevigny says. “I’ve never had to do that before, and as an actor, you want to find the truth of the character, and then there was, of course, not one singular truth to her. And plus, nobody really knows what happens.”
After working together on two seasons of “American Horror Story” and then “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” Sevigny received a call from Murphy, who felt strongly that she should play the mysterious Menendez matriarch.
“From the very get-go, he pitched me having this opus kind of episode, where I get to really examine alcoholism and abuse and a lot of complicated issues that people don’t necessarily like to face,” Sevigny says of the sixth episode, which chronicles José and Kitty’s relationship against the backdrop of family therapy sessions. “I think that’s not how we justify doing these kinds of [true-crime stories], but we hope that they can give someone the courage to speak out if they are in a position where they’re being mistreated.”
Sevigny with Javier Bardem in “Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez Story.”
(Netflix)
As one of New York’s “It” girls of the ’90s, Sevigny barely spent any time at home watching television, but she still remembers seeing photographs of the Menendez brothers during their murder trials on the front pages of newsstands. In preparation for the part, Sevigny revisited the era. She read writer Dominick Dunne’s buzzy Vanity Fair stories about the trials. She read a few books about Kitty’s upbringing, which revealed her history of self-medicating. She even watched the brothers’ trial testimony, in which they alleged that José had sexually abused them as children.
At a Vanity Fair party, Sevigny met a director whose wife had been close friends with Kitty and claimed that Kitty had genuinely loved her children. But while “Monsters” offers a brief glimpse of maternal love at the very end, the series as a whole takes a decidedly different approach.
“There were aspects of the character that I tried to lean into that I thought, ‘Oh, you don’t often see a mother complain about her children in the way that she does, like, “I hate my kids. They ruined my life.”’ There are certain things that you never, or rarely, see on TV,” Sevigny says. What was more difficult for her to wrap her head around was the thought of a mother who is willfully blind to child abuse: “What kind of person does that, and how do you access that kind of emotion, or the strength, for lack of a better word, or the cowardice to behave in that way in those certain situations?
(Larsen&Talbert / For The Times)
“The series is also an examination of the cycles of abuse and how hard it is for people to break out of those cycles,” adds Sevigny, who found it easy to act frightened when confronted with Bardem’s high intensity. “She had been abused, and her mother had been abused by her father. Her mother left her father, and she was raised without a dad. I think that can often be a reason for women to stay with their husbands because they think, ‘Oh, maybe just having a father around outweighs the abuse,’ which is not true, obviously.”
“Monsters” has not been without controversy, however. Last September, Erik publicly criticized the series for its inaccuracies and for implying an incestuous relationship between him and Lyle. (Erik has formed a bond with Koch, with whom he has remained in touch, and Lyle has since commended the series for helping viewers understand the long-term effects of child abuse.)
“The Netflix team had given us all these talking points, and we were supposed to stay very disengaged [from the brothers] — and Cooper did not listen to them,” Sevigny recalls with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Wow, this young boy, this is his first [big] thing, and he’s coming out the gate just speaking his mind.’ Being a woman and an actress, and growing up in the ’90s, we were all silenced and muzzled in a way, so it’s interesting to watch these young people have the agency and advocacy to speak up for themselves.”
In May, the brothers were resentenced to 50 years to life in prison, which makes them eligible for parole. Sevigny is no stranger to being part of zeitgeisty shows, having played one of the wives of a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon in HBO’s “Big Love” around the time that Warren Jeffs was convicted of child sexual assault: “You want to make art, hopefully, that gets people talking and engaged, and I think [‘Monsters’] has done that to the umpteenth.”
Sevigny found out that she had been nominated for her first Emmy while driving to the airport in Los Angeles, where she has been shooting Peacock’s “The Five-Star Weekend” opposite Jennifer Garner. The actor ultimately sees the show’s 11 total nominations as an acknowledgment of Murphy’s enduring creative vision.
“I respect all the diverse shows that he makes, and that he hires the same actors, artisans and craftsmen over and over. To validate his choice in me for that part also felt really important, because I think that he sticks his neck out for people a lot,” says Sevigny, who celebrated the achievement with a small Champagne toast during her flight back to New York. “The kinds of stories that he’s trying to tell are often challenging and people shy away from them, and the work that he does is important. And now maybe he’ll hire me again!”
