Cooper Koch plays Erik Menendez in the new Netflix series Monsters and he got to meet the real person just a few days ago.
The 28-year-old actor is opening up about what it was like to meet Erik, how they shared a hug, and what they talked about.
Cooper visited the prison with Kim Kardashian and he’s also explaining how they became connected.
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“We just looked at each other, and immediately embraced. He was so kind. Lyle, too, I got to hug both of them and just be in their presence,” he said. “They’re such upstanding individuals. They’ve done so much work in their prison. Erik teaches meditation and speech classes, and they’re doing this Greenspace project to improve the prison grounds. It was just amazing.”
“I got to have a really good conversation with him and tell him that I believe him and I did everything I could as an actor to advocate for him and portray him as authentically as possible, and that I think the show does a really good job of representing him,” Cooper told Variety.
He added, “We had a really nice conversation. We talked about other things like I went to Calabasas High School, which is where he went when he first moved to California. My father graduated Beverly Hills High School the year before Erik got there. We have all of these weird parallels.”
Cooper said he understands why Erik has been critical of the series.
“I told him that it makes sense that you would feel this way,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have the worst part of your life, such a traumatic and tragic thing, be televised for millions of people to see in a dramatized Hollywood TV way. I just said, ‘I understand, I get it, and I stand with you.’”
Cooper was connected to Kim through his stylist Jamie Mizrahi, who is friends with the reality star.
He said, “They were having lunch together and I got a text from Jamie. It was a video of Kim being like, ‘I love you in the show. You’re so amazing.’ I was like this is so crazy but then they texted that they wanted to call me. Kim gets on the phone and starts asking me all these questions about Erik and about the brothers. Then she told me that she was going down there and asked me if I wanted to go with them. It all happened very quickly.”
Read what Ryan Murphy had to say in response to backlash from the Menendez family.
