Ari Graynor has tears in her eyes. We had been scheduled to speak this afternoon, Oct. 24, about her role in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, the Netflix miniseries that has helped reignite public fascination with the 1989 murder case in which the two brothers, 18 and 21 at the time, shot their parents to death in the family’s Beverly Hills mansion. Coincidentally, our Zoom chat is now happening at the exact moment Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón is giving a press conference in which he’ll recommend a resentencing for Erik and Lyle Menendez, who have each spent more than three decades in jail for their crimes.
As she processes the recommendation in real time, an emotional Graynor swivels her head back and forth from the television behind her to the camera. “You know, nothing happens in a void,” she says. “Murder doesn’t happen in a void; a trial doesn’t happen in a void. We are all part of the culture, and everything is connected.”
The Menendez brothers are currently serving life sentences for the gruesome killings of music executive José Menendez and his wife Kitty. In their first of two trials, Erik and Lyle argued the murders had been in self-defense, citing years of sexual abuse by their father, and their mother’s failure to protect them. The prosecution, however, maintained that the brothers had fabricated the abuse claims and were instead motivated by a desire for money. Within the first six months of their parents’ deaths, Erik and Lyle went on a spending spree totaling about $700,000, snapping up cars, houses, and Rolex watches.
The original trial, which resulted in a hung jury, was the first one of its kind ever to be televised, laying the cultural groundwork for true crime as entertainment. Thirty-five years later, the case is being scrupulously re-evaluated thanks to the Ryan Murphy-produced Monsters — which the real Menendez family has denounced as a “grotesque shockadrama” due to its suggestion that the brothers were incestuously involved with each other — as well as a new Netflix documentary featuring interviews with Erik and Lyle.
Even with the discord around Monsters, this one-two punch of new media positioning the brothers not as sociopathic yuppies but instead as victims has sparked a renewed frenzy around the case. Younger viewers, many of whom either do not remember or were not yet born when the original televised trial happened in the 1990s, feel that the brothers were unjustly sentenced, and that their claims of sexual abuse as children were unfairly dismissed by a skeptical public who believed that only women could make credible claims of sexual abuse.
“I believe deeply that they should be out of prison, and they were horrifically abused,” Graynor says. “And they went on a spending spree, and they were asshole kids. Things can be both.”
Graynor, 41, made her TV debut on The Sopranos, playing Meadow Soprano’s anxious college roommate, and has had a healthy career onscreen and on stage since. In addition, she also happens to be a talented photographer. It’s something she’s done on and off since childhood, but she really picked it back up in the last year when she was “in strike mode.” As the 2023 SAG-AFTRA work stoppage was playing out, “I was considering what I might have to do with my life post-strike if [a] big job didn’t come again,” Graynor says. “I was like, well, maybe I’ll be a photographer. I’ll really lean into that.”
In fact, while on the Los Angeles set of Monsters, in which she portrays criminal defense attorney Leslie Abramson, she snapped a series of arresting portraits of castmates Nicholas Alexander Chavez (Lyle), Cooper Koch (Erik), Nathan Lane (journalist Dominick Dunne), and Jess Weixler (co-counsel Jill Lansing), three of which are shown here.
Chavez, left, and Koch on set. Graynor says she strives to capture “the relationship between a person and the larger context of their experience.”
Ari Graynor
“I’ve always felt like an observer,” Graynor says of her work on the other side of the camera. “It’s a funny thing about being an actor — you’re so front-and-center, but there’s this watchful gaze of taking things in and and seeing a moment. I think a lot of my photographs… [capture] something private that is happening with somebody, or the relationship between a person [and] how they fit within the larger context [of] their experience, which, in a way, is also true of a character in a story… Not to sound hokey, but I think at its greatest hope, art is about dissolution of the self into something bigger.”
As a photographer, Graynor tends to shoot from a one-off, instinctual place. “I can have the same roll of film in the camera traveling around with me for six months, [and] I’ll just be sitting somewhere and see something. Then I’ll grab the camera and take one photo,” she says. That’s what led Graynor to shoot a pensive portrait of Lane, whom she captured among the courtroom spectators with the Menendez family actors out of focus behind him. “There was this incredible light on this dark soundstage pointed at him, and he was just sitting in thought,” Graynor says. “I just grabbed [my camera] and took it.”
That she was able to crystalize the filming experience in this way was not so much planned as it was a happy accident. Most of the courtroom shots exist simply because Graynor remembered to bring her camera that day. On days where they would film scenes in the prison conference area, Graynor describes how Koch and Chavez sometimes would sit on their own in the set’s jail cells. “I’d tell them to go get in front of them,” she says, describing a poignant, black-and-white photo where Chavez is standing in front of the bars and Koch is behind them.
The portraits of Lane and Koch and Chavez are currently hanging up in Graynor’s house, where she looks at them every day. “I wish I had taken more,” she says. “There’s something beautiful about shooting on film. I have thousands of pictures on my phone, and of course, I never look at most of them. But that’s what I love about the specialness of an actual photograph. There’s an actual moment, and there’s a finite number of them, and you really get to hold that with you. It lands in a different way.”
Despite the show’s thorny subject matter, Graynor remembers the mood on set as “incredibly sweet,” theorizing that the respectful vibe came partially from a sense of gratitude to be working on a “special” Ryan Murphy show. (Monsters was one of the first projects to go back into production following the strike.) “There was so much goodwill and appreciation coming in there,” Graynor says. “Everybody held the space with a lot of grace and gentleness.”
Graynor was movee by Lane “sitting in thought.”
Ari Graynor
Graynor also understood that she would need to find a way to mentally separate from acting through scenes that described child sexual abuse in harrowing detail. “I can fall down a hole sometimes in my own work,” she says. “There was a really intense play I did, and I could not shake it. I would come home and cry every night. Finding that internal boundary has definitely been something that I’ve thought about more recently. [Koch and Chavez] were such a gift in that way. Especially for some of the stuff I was doing with Cooper, where you would go there, and maybe right after a take, we would hug and cry and shake. Then we’d be like, ‘OK, what are we going to do for dinner?’”
In her portrayal of the shrewdly determined Abramson, it’s clear that Graynor worked tirelessly to obtain a detailed understanding of her subject, the public misogyny the attorney faced in her defense of the Menendez brothers, and how the years-long trial and unforgiving media scrutiny affected her morale. “She has been hearing about the hardest parts of humanity for 30 years,” Graynor says. “When I was first listening to her book on tape and she goes through some of her other cases, they are hard to hear. At first, I would skip over them, because I was like, ‘This is too hard.’ Then I realized, ‘No, I have to. I have to build up my ability to hear this. I have to build up that muscle of holding, hearing, and being moved’… With lesser drawn characters, you’re using your own way of internalizing things. But when you have a clearly drawn character — especially somebody who is a real person — this was a new experience for me to recalibrate. It was challenging as an actor and as a human to sit, watch, and listen to the boys. As Ari, all I wanted to do was sob and hug them. But [Abramson] was holding space for them in a different way.”
Graynor has not spoken directly to Abramson, who is now in 81 and has declined to participate in most of the ongoing Menendez coverage. In a statement shared with the Netflix documentary producers, Abramson said: “Thirty years is a long time. I’d like to leave the past in the past. No amount of media, nor teenage petitions will alter the fate of these clients. Only the court can do that and they have ruled.” More recently, Abramson told reporters of the Murphy series: “That piece of shit that I heard about? … I didn’t watch the last series, and I don’t watch any of the shows about it.” Graynor did compose an unsent email to the since-retired lawyer, which she fears would not be well-received.
“With the blowback and the controversy — there’s lots of opinions, and I understand all of it as part of the energy,” Graynor acknowledges. “Maybe people had opinions about certain things in the show, but they weren’t untrue. We like really clear narratives… I do feel we were able to share something that was deeply true about this for [Erik and Lyle], and the pain of Leslie where she was not able to be heard.”
THE INCENDIARY NATURE of a Ryan Murphy show combined with a major cultural reevaluation of the Menendez brothers’ case has also resulted in Graynor experiencing an unprecedented peak in her acting career. At the same time, to call this moment her “big break” would feel strange, since Graynor has worked consistently for years, showing up in cult classics like Drew Barrymore’s Whip It, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and the Room-parodying Disaster Artist. On the small screen, Graynor has had supporting roles in prestige miniseries such as Mrs. America and network fare like J.J. Abrams’ sci-fi procedural Fringe.
Still, having spent the majority of her career as a working actor, Graynor was not at all immune to periods of doubt. In fact, immediately before being hired on Monsters, she was reevaluating to what extent she wanted to keep going at all. “There are moments that have come up multiple times, not because my love has waned for acting,” she says. “But it’s tough out there. There’s always been a name-game element in casting, of course, since the advent of movie studios. But… for somebody like me who’s been around for a really long time and has a beautiful career, [I’ve] also been at it long enough where I know when the juice is worth the squeeze.”
Graynor describes the vibe on set as sweet and respectful: “Everybody held the space with a lot of grace and gentleness.”
Ari Graynor
Prior to Monsters, Graynor thought she might experience a mid-career boost from working on the second season of HBO’s sports drama Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, where she acted opposite John C. Reilly’s team owner Jerry Buss as one of his romantic partners, Honey Kaplan. “Some of [our] scenes were so alive and exciting,” Graynor says, recalling a fantasy song-and-disco-dance sequence with Reilly that didn’t make the final cut. “I had an amazing experience, and I’m proud of the work, but how something feels when you’re doing it versus how it’s cut together, and how much that storyline resonates [with audiences] — you just never know. So, that aired, and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t think this is gonna give me the bump we were hoping for.’”
HBO ultimately canceled Winning Time in September 2023 after two seasons, citing falling ratings. Around the same time, the SAG-AFTRA strike was in full swing. Graynor had auditioned for the part of Leslie Abramson in Monsters, but due to restrictions surrounding the strike, couldn’t talk about it openly. “There were so many unknowns, especially after the pandemic,” she says. “It’s always a funny thing as an actor, where the either-or of what your life is going to look like are so disparate, and so you can’t bank on one. You can’t assume that something’s going to happen. So I put it out of my mind. The day the strike ended, the offer came in, and it really felt like winning the lottery.”
In the weeks since Monsters dropped on Netflix, Graynor has sat back in awe of the resulting Menendez whirlwind. In addition to public discourse surrounding the miniseries and documentary, the brothers’ attorneys filed new evidence last year that pointed to the abuse perpetrated by José Menendez. Calls from the brothers’ family, celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, and human rights advocates urged Gascón’s office to release Erik and Lyle. Graynor has even gotten the chance to personally visit with Lyle, whom she calls “wonderful.”
After Graynor watches Gascón formally request that the brothers be resentenced to 50-years-to-life, which would enable them to receive an immediate parole hearing and possible release, she cranes her neck to face the TV and wipes away another tear. A judge has since set a Dec. 11 date to consider the D.A.’s request. “I pray that as this goes down the line, they end up getting out, as they should,” she says. “It’s just incredibly moving to see all of the energy around the show — the controversy, the support, all of the parts of it — and see where this has led.”
