Why 'Monarch' Godzilla show was a 'strange new experience' for Kurt and Wyatt Russell
Wyatt Russell has spent 37 years hanging with his dad, Kurt, around the house, on movie sets and everywhere in between. So starring with him on the Apple TV+ show “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” – alongside Godzilla, no less – Wyatt didn’t learn anything new about his old man.
Kurt Russell, however, discovered something new about his son as an artist. “I was just really impressed with Wyatt's demeanor,” the elder Russell, 72, says proudly. “He’s just a really good communicator. Everybody feels comfortable and listened to and heard, and he very gently gets his point across. I knew that about him as a human being, but as a guy on a set? That's a skill not a lot of people have at that level.
“Other than that, nah. I've seen him. He's really good,” he adds, laughing.
In “Monarch” (streaming weekly Fridays), the Russells act for the first time in the same project. Wyatt plays Lee Shaw, an Army soldier in the 1950s working with scientists to investigate the appearances of huge monsters called Titans. Kurt plays the same character in the 2010s, now jaded and driven by a loss from his past.
“You can fall into the father/son thing very easily. You're bringing that baggage in with you,” Kurt Russell says. Because he was playing an earlier version of Lee, “Wyatt was setting the tone,” and then the two had “a lot of fun talking about that and working on the character to make sure we were in the same movie, being the same person.”
They brainstormed adopting each other’s physicality: For example, Wyatt’s a little taller, so they’d work on posture and ways to sit. The Russells practiced dialogue together, with one playing their version of Lee and the other standing in for other characters. Kurt studied his son during takes, and after a while he knew what Wyatt liked and didn’t like in performance.
“It was a strange and new experience,” Kurt Russell says. “By nature, actors watch people. Wyatt and I are guilty of that. We get a kick out of different human beings. But you don't go on a set and study another actor because you're playing the same part. I thought it was going to be a lot of fun to do that, but within 15 seconds, I was fascinated at my own reaction, because I'd seen this guy all my life. I'd never studied him, never looked at him. And it was almost like a separation, which was good, of being his father (and) of him being my son.”
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Similarly, Wyatt – whose mom is actress Goldie Hawn – enjoyed seeing his father in a different light. “My dad's charisma on camera is undeniable,” he says. “My favorite movie in the world is ‘Used Cars.' I've seen the movie 175,000 times and can recite every line. There are things that I know that are him, that he accentuates on camera that sometimes I'd think about trying to accentuate.
“But as much as sometimes I'd even catch myself wanting to, Lee in the ‘50s is not Lee in 2015. It was also trying to show a little bit of a difference in this character's arc.”
As far as Wyatt's onscreen outings, his father’s favorites include the 2022 Hulu miniseries “Under the Banner of Heaven” (“That’s a hell of a job there”) and AMC's 2018-19 drama “Lodge 49,” in which Wyatt played a character that reminded his dad of his own role in “Captain Ron.” “I like watching Wyatt do different things,” Kurt Russell says.
“It's got to be so different, though, because now having a kid, watching your son is so different than watching your dad,” says Wyatt, the father of 2-year-old Buddy and has another baby on the way with his wife, actress Meredith Hagner. “If I saw my son do something, it'd be like, ‘You're the best actor in the world!’ ”