Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters delivers all the Monsterverse action you’d want from a 10-episode series that further explores the cinematic mash-up of Godzilla and King Kong. But it also provides something you wouldn’t necessarily expect: compelling human drama.
Following the Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island films, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters combines multiple timelines to explore the development of Monarch, a top-secret organization dedicated to the study of MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism). It includes the aftermath of Godzilla’s destruction of San Francisco in 2014’s Godzilla and introduces us to Cate Randa (Shōgun’s Anna Sawai), a teacher who lost most of the students under her charge when Godzilla destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. When she travels to Japan to explore her presumed-dead father’s apartment, she uncovers a series of secrets that leads her and a small team on international adventures.
Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Monarch showrunner Chris Black sits down to talk about the series’s intersection of monster mayhem and trauma-heavy human drama. He talks about the legacy of Godzilla and how it resonates with modern audiences. He also offers insights into why so many modern television projects deal with trauma in unique ways. Finally, he talks about leveraging legendary actor Kurt Russell and son Wyatt Russell to play the same character in different decades.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters streams exclusively on Apple TV+.
Awards Daily: So, Chris, I have to tell you that Monarch was an unexpected surprise. I love the balance of good old-fashioned monster movie destruction and this human pathos, this human story that really balances particularly well in the multiple eras. I found it incredibly absorbing and congratulations on that.
Chris Black: Well, thank you. I think that’s the response that we had hoped for and really appreciate that people picked up on. When, we talked about doing the Godzilla show for television, I think there was probably an expectation of what that show was going to be based upon the scale and spectacle and focus of the feature films. When people have watched it and say, yes, you delivered on that, but you also gave us something that we weren’t expecting that we found really surprising, which was this more character-forward drama about this family and about trauma and about secrets and betrayal. That’s very gratifying for us to hear. I’m glad that you enjoyed it and picked up on that.
Awards Daily: Absolutely. So, I want to start with, historically, Godzilla and earlier incarnations of Godzilla all came out of a paranoia about nuclear / atomic power, but it feels like maybe that meaning has morphed a little bit. Where do you think the fascination with Godzilla and other monsters from that universe comes from and what do you think it represents today?
Chris Black: Well, it’s an interesting question. You could write a master’s theses on that question, more than we have time to talk about today. But it is interesting. When you look at the early films, particularly the first film from 1954, it’s a very somber, melancholy meditation, and it’s very dark and ends with Dr. Serizawa essentially killing himself because he refuses to live. He wants to take the secret of this terrible weapon he’s designed to destroy Godzilla to his grave and doesn’t want to unleash it on the world. It’s very dark and very deep. Then the movies obviously evolved. At a certain point in the 60s, they become a little goofier, and they’re riffs on spy movies and gangster movies and Godzilla becomes the friend to all children. Then, you get into the 70s, and you have movies that are clearly about issues of the environment and environmental degradation and stuff like that.
So I feel like you can look at Godzilla as this existential symbol for whatever’s threatening us in our current era whether it’s war or terrorism or climate change and global warming. To me anyway, what makes the monsters so timeless is they are really mirrors to our most existential fears and dreads. It’s like you can see reflected in it whatever your current fear about how the world is going to end is.
Awards Daily: Sure. I’d like to lean in toward the war aspect of it. The series deals with the aftermath of San Francisco’s destruction, and so much of Monarch is about rebuilding and about people reconnecting and loss of life and the tragedy that Anna Sawai’s character goes through. When I look at that experience, I think about 9/11 and the Ukraine or the Gaza Strip.
Chris Black: I think it goes to the sort of universality of that fear or dread. Those two specific examples, the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, our development of the show predated both of those. So it wasn’t something that we were thinking or talking about at the time. But the fact that you can see that reflected in the show, I think, is representative of the sort of universality of that.
You talk about 9/11. We talked a lot about 9/11, and when Matt Fraction and I were developing the show, Matt used to say that our show wasn’t a 9/11 show. It was a 9/12 show. It was about what happens after. How the world has changed. How you go to bed one night and your perception of the reality of the world is set, and you wake up the next day and it’s completely different. That was how we tried to look at the human characters of our show. It wasn’t a show about monsters, but it was a show about people who lived in a world who suddenly discovered that monsters are real and monsters exist. That can very much be seen as a metaphor for 9-11.
Awards Daily: There are so many shows right now that do have this recurrent theme of trauma, the legacy of trauma, generational trauma, even one that I’ve been watching recently in an entirely different form is X-Men ’97. Why do you think that is such a prevalent theme right now?
Chris Black: Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to get too deep or political. In a way, it’s good drama. It’s good conflict. It may feel particularly acute right now, given the world that we live in and the divisiveness. As you pointed out, the war and trauma and suffering that’s going on in the world may make that seem particularly acute when you’re watching our show. But looking at it from a writing perspective, it’s something I think you could visit in almost any show in any era because it’s just such fertile ground for character drama and conflict.
I love to write shows about families. It’s my way into people. It’s funny because people joke, ‘Oh, you must have had a terrible childhood.’ I didn’t! I got along great with my parents! It is, though, such a crucible for good drama that it’s almost irresistible. Matt once pointed out that, if we’ve done our jobs right, the show should work if you take Godzilla out of it. If it’s just about the family drama of a brother and a sister looking for their father, I don’t think it’s quite as fun a show if you take Godzilla out of it, but dramatically, I think he was right.
Awards Daily: You talked earlier about fantastic cast led by Anna Sawai, but you also have a very interesting pair of actors working playing the same role. Tell me about working with Kurt and Wyatt Russell to play that same character.
Chris Black: Well, it was amazing. It was funny because it was not written for them. Initially very early in the process before we even started talking about casting, we wanted this sage mentor character, this older character of Shaw, who sort of bridged the two storylines and was a bit in the past and a bit in the present.
We wanted to find some great veteran actor who could play this, and we always just assumed we would open the casting process to cast two great actors who could conceivably come across as the same character in two different time periods. Then, it was actually Ronna Kress, our amazing casting director, who came to us and said Kurt and Wyatt Russell are available and have been looking for a long time to do something together.
They’d been offered the role of father and son a lot, but they have never been offered the role of playing the same character in two different time periods. It was really intriguing to them. We had some great meetings with them. Kurt’s very hands on with who his character is and likes to get in and be part of the process. He likes to pressure test stuff and see what works, and what you get is, ultimately, a much better result than if we had been doing it in a vacuum.
Awards Daily: So what’s your favorite moment across this first season?
Chris Black: I think the day we wrapped. [Laughs] Joking aside, it’s always a relief. Everybody’s been working so hard and running at full speed that you’re happy to be done with the season. But I think the biggest moment for me was working in Tokyo. I’d never been to Japan before. Culturally, Godzilla the franchise is rooted in Japanese culture. He is an icon and a treasure in Japan. It was incredibly important to us and our cast to keep it grounded and authentically Japanese. That was really an extraordinary experience to be able to go and work and shoot in Tokyo.
