Wyatt Russell has not been shy when talking about his great experience working with his father, legendary actor Kurt Russell, on the Apple TV+ drama “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.” But one question he’s frequently asked doesn’t have a satisfying answer.
“Normally, I’m asked, ‘What did you learn from your dad?’ And the answer to that is, ‘nothing,’ because I grew up with him,” Wyatt tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. But ask Wyatt what insights he gleaned from working with Kurt on the show to build the character Lee Shaw – the army veteran at the center of a decades-spanning mystery within the MonsterVerse franchise universe – and that’s a different story.
“Insight is different. Insights I could take away from were how he can adapt to a situation very well. I hadn’t experienced it before,” Wyatt says. “You can’t know that about an actor until you’ve worked with them. You only see the result. I didn’t see the adaptation of what was happening, what he was having to do [in his past roles]. But seeing it in person, while it was happening on- and off-camera, was unbelievably impressive.”
But there was something else that Wyatt loved seeing his dad share on the set of “Monarch”: Kurt’s unending enthusiasm for the profession.
“Here’s a person who has been in the industry for 62 years. He’s 73 years old. He’s done everything there is to do. And he’s still the most energetic person on set,” Wyatt says. “If you think you’re ever gonna get anything less than 110 percent from him, you’re very, very mistaken. And so having people go, ‘Oh my God, holy sh–, I gotta keep up with this guy who feels like he’d 25, but he’s 72’ – that was fun to watch. Sometimes people were like, ‘How does he keep the pace?’ It’s like, oh, that’d be because this is what we do. This is our job. So that was fun to watch.”
Created by Chris Black and Matt Fraction and set within the MonsterVerse franchise of Godzilla and King Kong films like 2014’s “Godzilla,” 2017’s “Kong Skull: Island,” and this year’s “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” is ostensibly about the rise of Monarch, the shadowy government group responsible for keeping tabs on the titan monsters. But the series is about so much more than just kaiju fights thanks to its characters, chiefly Lee Shaw. Wyatt plays Lee in the 1950s when he, alongside Bill Randa (Anders Holm, playing a younger version of the character first portrayed by John Goodman in “Kong Skull: Island”) and Keiko Miura (breakout star Mari Yamamoto), helped found Monarch. In the show’s present timeline – actually 2015, just after the Godzilla attack depicted in 2014’s “Godzilla” – an elderly Shaw, now played by Kurt, helps Bill’s grandchildren solve the mystery of their father’s disappearance and estrangement from Monarch, all while trying to stop the next attack.
“It was such a good idea,” Wyatt says about playing the dual role with his dad. “It was a Godzilla world, Godzilla is an international star icon, and so if we were going to do something together, it felt like it could be impactful, and worth our time, energy, and effort. And as we went down the road of figuring out if this was something that we’d want to do, it was just like, ‘Okay, yeah, I think that the way they’ve woven the story and how they say they want to write this character, that it could be something really interesting.’”
Before he was famous, Wyatt played a younger version of his father in the film “Soldier,” but this is the first time father and son actors with stature in the industry shared the same character in the same film or show. But while Wyatt and Kurt share similar sensibilities and approaches to preparing for roles, their acting styles are fairly divergent. So the challenge for both men became making Lee feel seamless across the decades of the show’s narrative, despite the two actors filling the one role.
“The good part of the idea was that the mannerisms and things that are going to be intrinsic to who we are as people are going to be there,” Wyatt says. “But there are times when I’m much more subtle than my dad, and not in a good way or a bad way. It’s just, I think, my personality. I’m a little bit more laid back. And then there were times where I was like, ‘No, if you’re Kurt Russell in this scene – my instinct is to sort of lay back a little bit and his instinct might be to take the stage a little bit.’ That helped me, especially when Lee Shaw is supposed to have a little Kurt Russell swagger. And so there were times that played against what my normal instincts would be. But weirdly, your own father pushing you, and I think myself pushing him, was a cool way of interacting – even though we weren’t working together.”
All episodes of “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” are streaming on Apple TV+.
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