‘Menendez Brothers’ Series Rising Star Cooper Koch Is Getting Awards Season Buzz
The power of not being on Instagram is that while Cooper Koch is the star of one of this year’s biggest TV hits, he’s largely shielded from the attention.
“Luckily, no,” he says, when asked if he’s had many fan interactions. “Unless you run into me at Erewhon.”
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The Los Angeles native stars as Erik Menendez in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” which tells the story of the Beverly Hills-based brothers who were convicted of murdering their parents in 1989. The show debuted as the number-one series on Netflix worldwide and has led to renewed interest in the brothers’ case. (The case has been reopened, with a resentencing hearing set for December.)
“Monsters” has been getting Golden Globes and Emmys buzz since its premiere in September, which Koch is taking in stride.
“That’s what people have said, but I’m sort of not really believing them. It’s something in this industry, people say things or talk a lot, and then you will get let down. You’ll audition for something and you’ll be in the last sort of mix of it and they’re like, ‘This part’s yours. You’ve got it. It’s going to happen.’ And then you don’t get it,” he says. “And so I don’t know; I try not to believe anything that anyone says, but if that were to happen, then that would just be so overwhelming and amazing. I can only hope that something like that will happen.”
Though he might not see the attention online, Koch has been feeling it in other ways: Earlier this month he attended his first fashion show — the Giorgio Armani extravaganza in New York. The experience was filled with pinch-me moments, including sharing a car to the after party with Brie Larson and Orlando Bloom.
“I met so many people that I’ve admired for a long time, and it was crazy because they were the ones that were coming up to me and knew who I was, which was just the most sort of bizarre turn of events,” he says. “It was so strange. I felt like I was part of the club.”
After the success of “Monsters” season one, which starred Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer, Koch recalls seeing the announcement that season two would focus on the Menendez brothers.
“I knew I would get the audition for it. I look like him,” he says.
Despite the title of the show, Koch sees Erik differently, and connected with several different parts of him.
“I just care about him and I had a lot of empathy for him and his story, and I believed him. There’s a lot of speculation on whether you believed him or not, whether people believed him or not, and I did. And there were a lot of similarities between us: both going to Calabasas High School, growing up in L.A., the Beverly Hills of it all, my dad and my grandma live in Beverly Hills,” he says. “And he dealt with so much shame, and I’ve dealt with a lot of shame in my life. And so all of those things made me really connect to him.”
Koch, who is 28, started doing theater at the age of 5, and discovered he really loved the craft when he played Tony in “West Side Story” as an early teen.
“I remember killing Riff and then feeling real feelings and being like, ‘Whoa, this is really cool. I think I would want to do this,’” he says.
Koch’s grandfather, Hawk Koch, was president of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science and the Producers Guild of America, as well as a film producer. Yet Koch was so focused on theater, rather than movies, that he didn’t pay that much attention until more recently.
“I was only encouraged just to follow what I love to do, but I don’t think it really had anything to do with my grandparents. I wasn’t really into movies that much growing up, I was more just into doing musical theater, which my mom put us in. And so I didn’t really care until later in life when I was in college and I was studying acting and I started watching films,” he says. “My grandfather, who was a member of the Academy and who was president of the Academy and was very heavily involved in movies throughout his life, it didn’t really connect until later in my life.”
Koch’s career thus far has been mainly in the horror realm. In addition to “Monsters,” Koch’s credits include body horror movie “Swallowed” and slasher film “They/Them,” though he insists he’s not trying to become known as a scary movie guy.
“When you’re an actor and you’re auditioning, you’re throwing tapes at the wall and there’s only a certain amount of things that will stick. And so those happen to just be the ones that stuck,” he says. “It’s not necessarily my favorite genre, it’s just sort of what people have said yes to. So hopefully people will be able to see me doing something else. Otherwise maybe I’ll have to just be like, ‘OK, maybe the only reason I got those things is because that’s what I’m supposed to do.’”
Up next, he’d love to return to theater, and is also manifesting an adaptation of “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara.
“I want to explore other areas and do different things,” he says. “I have so much more to offer than just showing my private parts and doing scary things.”
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