“Mainly, the struggle was really getting a good balance between the music and the sound effects, because there’s a lot of music in the show,” reveals Ben Cook, the multiple Emmy-winning sound designer for the Apple TV+ series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” the long-gestating show in the MonsterVerse franchise that premieres November 17 on the streamer. He speaks with Gold Derby’s Latasha Ford before a packed launch event at the DGA Theater in Hollywood earlier this month. He says, “You’re talking about sequences where you have these creatures fighting each other, so it’s very bombastic. The music’s bombastic, and people are yelling, which is bombastic. So there’s a lot of competing elements… It’s a lot of sound, and we had a lot of fun doing it for sure.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
And if he were to summarize “Monarch” in three words, it would be these: “Big, giant, enormous.” He adds, “As a sound person, you’re always looking for new ways to do things and you’re always listening for new things.” He found it in his new job, which gave him “lots of opportunities in the scripts for sound creation. That was exciting.”
Cook has been a successful sound mixer, editor and designer and sound effects editor in television going back nearly 30 years. He’s been honored with 10 Emmy nominations and won four trophies, working on shows including “Deadwood, Big Love” and “Rome” for HBO, “Rescue Me” for FX, “Black Bird” for Apple TV+ and “Smallville” for Warner Bros. TV. He was also a sound effects editor on the “Austin Powers” movies. Given all of his experience, Cook was an easy choice for “Monarch’s” showrunner and executive producer Chris Black. It also didn’t hurt that they had worked together before on the 2016-17 Cinemax horror drama “Outcast.” Cook also worked with “Monarch” co-producer Scott Schofield on the Netflix reboot of “Lost in Space” from 2018-21 and is his main contact on “Legacy of Monsters.”
Part of what attracted him to the new project is the opportunity to rejoin old project colleagues like Black, Schofield and “Monarch” composer Leopold Ross (with whom Cook also worked on “Outcast”). He maintains, “You develop a language so you know what they’re looking for a lot of times without them saying it. Or you can pick up what they’re looking for in a few brief words. maybe. So, that’s always beneficial because the schedules are pretty tight.”
He’s also thrilled to be working on a project that features Godzilla, a monster that scared him pretty substantially as a kid. Why? “Well, I mean, everything he stood for,” Cook stresses, including this interesting antiwar, anti-nuclear proliferation. Those are scary things for kids to think about.” At the same the, he admits that King Kong scared him even more. “That movie,” he says. “Being held in the hands of a giant ape.”
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” features a cast headed by Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell. The series premieres on Apple TV+ on November 17 with a pair of episodes. A new episode follows each Friday through January 12, 2024.
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