Monsters Series: 5 Crazy Facts You Didn't Know
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00:00Yeah, I once received a note from him when I was doing a play on Broadway.
00:07He sent me a note to thank me for my performance and that he and whoever he had come with had
00:15such a great time and there it was, Dominic Dunne.
00:18Wow, I didn't know this.
00:19We've been doing this for two days, I didn't know.
00:22Yeah, well, I like to keep a few things for myself.
00:25Surprises.
00:26So many surprises.
00:27I know.
00:28So, yes, I knew who he was and, yeah, you know, Ryan Murphy, they sent the first four
00:45episodes.
00:46Stop me if you've heard this before.
00:49Sent me the first four episodes and so I thought the writing was exceptional and then he said,
00:57we got on the phone and he said, you know, and then we're going to hopefully do a later
01:02episode where we explore a little more of Dominic's backstory and what makes him tick.
01:08I had the privilege of speaking and meeting both of them and I can tell you they're absolutely
01:14incredible people.
01:16They've been so involved in prison reform.
01:19They're doing this green space project to try and make prisons a better place, a better
01:23environment for incarcerated individuals and Eric teaches speech classes, he teaches meditation.
01:31They both are filled with light and I think they're just excellent, excellent people and
01:37I hope that the social justice system can decide to give them a new trial and hopefully
01:42they can get parole.
01:45It was one of the major, major, major highlights of this whole experience.
01:53They are incredible writers, led by Ian Brennan who wrote that script for episode five.
01:59They wrote the script almost a year before we started shooting it.
02:03It never changed, which is such a rare thing in TV and I was, after I read it the first
02:11time, I put it down for a few months and I was too scared to look at it for a long time.
02:18I was just intimidated by it and wanted to feel like I really knew who Leslie was before
02:24I got in there and Cooper had to do such extraordinary, difficult work that I just wanted to support
02:37him as best I could and know exactly what I was doing so that, God forbid, I wasn't
02:45the one to mess that up.
02:49And we did it, we shot it eight times over two days, so we did it four times a day and
02:55our director, Michael Upendahl, was just amazing and we managed to get through it each time
03:03without stopping and I think Cooper and I were so locked in together.
03:08We had gotten very, very close.
03:10He was the first person I spoke to when the job became official and we just sort of fell
03:15in love and we lived five minutes away from each other where I was shooting, so he would
03:21come over almost every day.
03:23When we were shooting that, we would go before and after and, you know, actually something
03:29I've not said today, when we were in the middle of shooting on the first day of episode five
03:36and the first two takes were great but not exactly where we wanted them and Sarah Paulson
03:42is a dear friend and she had left me a voice note a few days before checking in and I knew
03:48Cooper loved her and I said, why don't, we were sort of holding each other and having
03:52a little cry and just sort of giving it over and then I was like, let's listen to the voice
03:57note from Paulson before we go in and it was just her reminding me of my only job was to
04:03be there for Leslie, not just in this scene but just in the work and we listened to it
04:07together and then we went off and then we did a take that we really felt good about
04:13but I think the one that's in the show is maybe the final time we did it but Cooper
04:17is extraordinary.
04:19I had a lot of empathy for Kitty.
04:21I was thinking a lot about my mother and her generation and women I know of her generation
04:28and you know, they were housewives and what it meant to them to be that and you know having
04:35to rely on the male in the household to support the family and when she was caught in the
04:45cycle of abuse, how would she ever get out, who would she turn to, you know, what were
04:48her options.
04:50It was a great opportunity to bring a creative option, the show is still a creative option,
04:58it's not a judgment on anything, to bring it to the audience so that they can see different
05:10versions and different options of what is believed, of what we know was something traumatic
05:19but trying to understand where that trauma came from, in the case of José Menéndez,
05:25the father, where did that come from, that pain that he could not face and that obviously
05:30created something very painful in the following generations, the lack of attention to his
05:39own trauma created a generational drama and that is an important issue to talk about
05:45and I think it is very well treated in the series.