Godzilla is joined by King Kong in an explosive second season of Monarch
Godzillas and Kongs and Russells, Oh my! Monarch: Legacy of Monsters returns for season two, and while the first outing had plenty of gargantuan creatures on the loose, a world already shaken by their mere existence should now start worrying about a new threat: Titan X.
Set in Legendary Pictures’ big-screen “MonsterVerse,” season one of the Apple TV series played out across two timelines. The contemporary events took place in 2015, one day after G-Day, as seen in the 2014 blockbuster Godzilla, with long-lost half-siblings Cate (Anna Sawai) and Kentaro (Ren Watabe) first discovering each other, then looking into their missing dad’s connection to a secretive monster-hunting organization called Monarch. The flashbacks, set between 1952 and 1959, focused on Cate and Ken’s grandparents Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and Bill Randa (Anders Holm), who — along with U.S. military liaison Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) — ended up founding Monarch.
Between the two timelines is Axis Mundi, a netherworld where time virtually stands still. At the end of season one, Cate and her hacker pal May (Kiersey Clemons) rescued the presumed-dead Keiko from this purgatory. The twist: because of the temporal distortion, grandma Keiko was the same age as when she disappeared decades ago. What’s more, while Cate and May spent just hours in this demented realm, two years had passed back home. Amidst their daring escape, they had to leave present-day Lee (played by Wyatt’s iconic dad, Kurt Russell) behind. Early in the season-two premiere, Cate made a risky play that saved Lee . . . but unleashed a whole new Titan catastrophe. Helping elemental balancer of the scales Godzilla handle that threat this year is his old frenemy King Kong, who charges onto the scene with a vengeance, after cameoing at the end of season one.
Yet as season two begins, the beasties take a temporary backseat to some human drama. “For Keiko, it’s absolute devastation amidst some kind of hope,” says Yamamoto. “Amidst Kong’s appearance, we didn’t really get to process her coming back after 59 years, so I think there’s a lot to be discovered. It hasn’t fully sunk in that she’s lost almost everybody she’s ever known and loved. I like to call season two the reckoning of all that’s happened in season one.”
The greatest loss to Keiko is that of Bill, played by Holm in the 1950s and John Goodman in the 1970s-set film Kong: Skull Island . But fans need not say goodbye to Bill Randa quite yet, as the new season takes us back to 1957 South America, before Keiko’s descent into Axis Mundi. “We’re in a Chilean fishing village based on clues we’ve uncovered, to find more clues to discover more monsters, and that really kind of tees up what’s happening in the modern timeline,” teases Holm. “For Billy, [the excursion shows] his passion for the truth and discovering what’s really out there, and his passion for curiosity trumping his relationship with Keiko. I need to go chase the truth, but Lee’s mission is to protect us, and I think that’s a little bit more appealing for Keiko.” Adds Yamamoto: “The individual relationships between Keiko, Lee and Billy, it’s more granular this season. You see why it works and what the issues are.”
As the one cast member who gets to work with both father and son, Yamamoto raves about the Russells’ ability to inhabit the same man. “They’re both incredible actors on their own, but when they’re working together to build this character, they work so hard on sounding alike,” she says. “Sometimes I do a double-take because they sound exactly the same. I don’t know if they’ve decided on it, but some words come out with the exact tone and inflection, and I am like, ‘I don’t know who I’m talking to anymore.’ It’s amazing because the Lee Shaw character is so guarded, but at the same time, you see everything in their eyes. It’s beautiful witnessing that, filtered through two different humans who are related.”
Holm, on the other hand, did not borrow cues from Goodman’s performance in Skull Island or the occasional cameo on this show. “John Goodman’s a legend who we’ve all grown up watching, so I did take a moment to be like, ‘Maybe I’ll watch it and steal some moves,’” says Holm. “But then I thought, ‘Am I going to be handcuffed to doing this move?’ And are people going to be like, ‘Are you doing moves?’ I just didn’t want to have that. The writers helped me tremendously; teeing up dialogue-wise, story-wise who this guy is before he gets to where John’s character of Bill was in Skull Island.”
Indeed, more so than the action, it’s the character arcs that rope actors and fans alike into Monarch. “I think it’s what separates it from other shows that have these big, spectacular city-decimating creatures,” says Holm. “Godzilla is iconic and Godzilla is definitely in the mix. But you’ve got these intricate human stories woven throughout that amplify everything that’s happening. We’re not just seeing people run from monsters tearing down a city. We’re really keying into who these people are, why they’re there, what’s happening in their lives, what happened generationally in their lives that they don’t even know about, that are affecting the decisions they make today as they run from or towards a monster.”
All these sci-fi conceits also afford the actors some rare opportunities. “For me, personally, it’s an incredible character to play because you have this historic context of post-war Japan and then getting to do monster-hunting, and also getting to time travel to modern day and suddenly become a grandma,” says Yamamoto. “How does she deal with that? There’s so many elements that I get to play — so for me, it’s such a blast.”
The wily vet of the bunch, Russell Sr. agrees the show raises many compelling questions — which he very much enjoys. “What’s great about science fiction is two words: ‘What if?’ And I love that we go into the, ‘What if this actually happened? How would you deal with it? How can you learn about it? How are you going to survive?’ I think the underlying story here, that’s always a part of the monster world, is not turning into a monster yourself as you’re trying to deal with these monsters. Every one of us has to face that.”
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, streaming on Apple TV