According to Deadline, Nathan Lane (The Birdcage, The Lion King) has joined the cast of Ryan Murphy‘s (American Crime Story, 9-1-1) true-crime series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. The series will be the second installment for Netflix after Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
According to Deadline, Lane is set to play an investigative journalist Dominick Dunne who wrote about the Menendez brothers trial for Vanity Fair. Dunne gained further notoriety for his coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial.
On Monsters, Lane will be joining Nicholas Chavez (General Hospital, Crushed) who is set to play Lyle and Cooper Koch (Swallowed, They/Them) who is set to play Erik. Javier Bardem (No Country For Old Men, Skyfall) and Chloë Sevigny (American Psycho, Zodiac), have been cast to portray their parents.
According to Deadline, the plot and setting of the series will be about the 1989 Lyle and Erik Menendez murders of their parents Jose and Kitty in their Los Angeles home. The story takes twist and turns as the brothers were not initially looked at as suspects. As the investigation went on the brothers eventually became the prime suspects after there were no other leads. They eventually confessed to killings, claiming their motivation behind their actions was years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of their father. The prosecution countered that the brothers motivation was to inherit their father’s multimillion-dollar estate. In 1996 Menendez brothers were sentenced to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole.
The series is the second installment of an anthology series behind the minds of Murphy and Ian Brennan (Glee, The Politician), Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which starred Evan Peters (Elvis and Nixon, Wish) as the title character. After debuting in September 2022, the series quickly became one of Netflix’s most popular English-language series ever, leading to Netflix’s green light two follow-up installments. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is slated to be the first installment to be developed.
Lane has recently appeared in Beau Is Afraid alongside Joaquin Phoenix (Gladiator, Joker), Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone, The Wire) and Stephen McKinley Henderson (Dune, Lady Bird). Lane is repped by CAA and Anonymous Content.