Although he looks a little more like his mother, Goldie Hawn, Wyatt Russell also has a resemblance to his iconic father, Kurt Russell. A detail that the writers of the Apple series “Monarch”, Chris Black and Matt Fraction, did not miss. The story is divided between the past and the present, and in each of them Lee Shaw must deal with Godzilla and many other large monsters. Although they initially thought that two actors with no connection between them would play those roles, when Kurt and Wyatt showed interest, they jumped at the opportunity. In an exclusive interview with La Vanguardia, father and son shared their impressions of the experience.
What was the hardest part and what was the funniest part about both of you playing the same character?
Kurt Russell: The most fun part for me was definitely seeing the finished series.
Wyat Russell: In a sense the hardest thing and the most fun were the same, because when you look back you realize that all the hard work paid off, and that makes the experience fun. If it hadn’t worked, all those complicated moments wouldn’t have been funny at all. The truth is that we worked a lot before filming to make sure that the young Lee and the old Lee had a connection, that there was an impact and that each one connected well with the moment they were living. There had to be similarities between the old man and the young man but they couldn’t be the same person, he had to have learned many things between one moment and the next. Everything happened through collaboration with the showrunners, Chris Black and Matt Fraction, who were simply wonderful. There were times when things were difficult, but we didn’t have a great time working with them. I think that collaboration was both the hardest and the most fun.
Kurt, would you say that Lee, at the age you play him, reacts the same way when he sees these huge monsters as he does when he’s played by Wyatt?
KR: No, not at all. Lee when he is young is learning, he is just realizing how things are. He has realized that there is something that he never imagined could exist in the real world and that it is there before his eyes. When he talks to them, people question everything, and that in turn forces him to question everything. Instead the older Lee when he sees them, he simply evaluates them, because that’s what he’s supposed to do Monarch. But it’s like he’s chasing tornadoes. Together with his companions they are risking great dangers all the time. And although they’re supposed to not get too close, unfortunately on a couple of occasions that’s exactly what happens.
What made you want to join the Monsterverse, this universe created by Toho where giant monsters are commonplace?
WR: What attracted us was what the people at Apple/Legendary told us, that even though this series is set in the Monsterverse, they couldn’t show 10 hours of monsters fighting each other. They wanted to make the story revolve around humans, their desires and needs. That to them was much more interesting than what a monster wants or needs. What we found very attractive and what was also a challenge, is that through what happens to humans you begin to understand these monsters, you learn what they want, what they enjoy, what they are looking for, why. exist. Being able to explain who these monsters are through human characters was the great challenge in “Monarch.”
KR: Something that is very fun about this series and that has generated a lot of debate is that it gives you the opportunity to learn about these monsters through the characters, particularly in the first few episodes. And that is something that had never been done in the cinema with them, where the focus was exclusively on the monsters. That caught our attention in the proposal, the possibility of explaining who our character was.
Why do you think Godzilla has never lost its validity after so many years?
KR: I think part of it is the magic of Hollywood. In that sense we are traveling down a new avenue in the folklore surrounding Godzilla. He was always there but had never been explored like we have. It’s also true that I grew up with Godzilla, but Wyatt didn’t know him.
WR: Well, I knew Godzilla existed in the monster world, but I never saw the movies. I had simply seen some clips on television.
KR: What we were clear about was that that was not what we wanted to do.
WR: Not because it was a bad thing or anything like that, because those movies were always entertaining and fun. But there is a test that I use when I put a movie on television that is already halfway done. If you start watching it at minute 47 and stay until the end, or can’t put it down for the next 20 minutes, it means it’s a good movie. In the case of monster movies, if they were showing them on television, I didn’t know what was happening and all I saw was a monster destroying a city, so I immediately changed the channel. Our hope is that if you start watching an episode of “Monarch” at minute 22 you will connect with the story of one of the characters, with their dialogues, and that this will generate an interest in understanding what the thing is about. That later, when the monster appears, that will excite you a little more. And that’s why I never got interested in monster movies. They just didn’t focus much on the characters, and that’s something that in a series that lasts 10 hours you couldn’t do.
KR: Exactly, for the story to develop well over 10 hours it has to take its time. Learning about monsters requires a certain pace, but at the same time, every time Godzilla appears, chaos begins. That is its essence.
Wyatt, you participated in several of your father’s films when you were a child. On those sets, did you dream that when you grew up you were going to work with him?
WR: No, never. In my childhood, what interested me had nothing to do with movies. Cinema was my parents’ job. They saw it that way. Obviously it was wonderful, but it wasn’t something I was interested in doing when I grew up, and it never crossed my mind that I would work with my dad when I grew up. When I got older and started acting, I thought that if I was good and managed to have some kind of career, inevitably people were going to think that working together was a good way to promote something. We’ve had several proposals over the years, but this is the first time we felt like it was something we hadn’t thought of before.
Kurt, when you saw Wyatt on his sets as a child, acting like it was a game, did you imagine he was going to follow in your footsteps?
KR: It’s funny, because in a way we do think about it. It’s just that I followed in my father’s footsteps. He was a professional baseball player and later he was an actor, something he enjoyed a lot. And I first had a great interest in baseball and then I did the same thing as him. Instead, Wyatt gravitated toward hockey and played it professionally. I guess he was inspired by our experiences as professional athletes, an inspiration that then led him into the world of creativity, which is a completely different atmosphere. The truth is that we always knew that Wyatt was a good actor because of the little things he did for fun. When he was little he did a play in which he played the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!”, and the audience got very excited. When I worked with him on “Soldier” in 1998, Wyatt had a big role. His scenes were at the beginning of the film and set the tone for what was to come later. I could see that he had a natural talent for behaving very realistically. And what he did in that film helped us a lot.
