How Nathan Lane Channeled Legendary Reporter Dominick Dunne for ‘Monsters’ Performance

Emmy-winning actor Nathan Lane was able to channel his performance as legendary crime reporter Dominic Dunne in Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story by going through the writer’s famous son, actor Griffin Dunne.

Lane’s performance is winning praise for his harnessing of the pain and loss Dunne held onto for decades after the double blow the writer experienced in the early 1980s of a tragedy and an injustice; as the series shows, the perceived miscarriage of justice informs Dunne’s perspective on crimes he covers for Vanity Fair and leads to his speculations about the nature of the Menendez boys’ relationship, which are peppered throughout the limited series. But it wasn’t only through researching his crime and trial reporting that Lane got into the mindset of the late legend.

“What helped was talking to Griffin Dunne, his son, a lovely actor and a wonderful writer who just had finished this memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club. Seeing his dad, from his point of view, was incredibly helpful to me, and especially hearing Griffin’s version of the trial of John Sweeney,” Lane told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview on Thursday. 

Actor and writer Griffin Dunne established a screen career in the 1980s with lead roles in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and opposite Madonna in Who’s That Girl? His memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, released in June, is a journey into the Dunne household that has tales like that of young Griffin being saved from drowning by Sean Connery, a launch party thrown by his aunt Joan Didion and uncle John Gregory Dunne at a party for Tom Wolf’s latest classic, and more true stories featuring a “boldface cast of characters and jaw-dropping scenes.” 

Before his enviable life in Los Angeles, Dominick Dunne’s career moved from that of a New York stage manager for television productions to Hollywood in the early 1970s, where he moved into films while circulating around the town’s establishment and elite, a longtime dream of his that actually came true; he helped bring The Boys in the Band to the screen as its executive producer in 1970 and was soon writing novels, some of which were based on famous true crimes.

The second half of Dunne’s life was defined by a broken heart after, in 1982, his daughter, Dominique Dunne, who that year appeared in the family horror classic Poltergeist, was strangled to death. As Monsters portrays, he attended the trial of her ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, and was shattered after he received only a six-and-a-half year sentence (then was released after two years served for involuntary manslaughter.) He wrote about the experience for Vanity Fair and the magazine’s new editor, Tina Brown, who discovered Dunne’s unique voice at a dinner party and decided his writing’s tone and texture was the model for the enduring title.

“Dominick had a voice that was so personal, that spoke to you right off the page. He just buttonholes you as soon as he starts, in his first sentence. And, that really is what a writer is, it’s a voice,” Brown said at the time. “I realized then that Vanity Fair had found its first voice. And we signed him up immediately and he became our first star writer and really, the defining voice of the magazine.” 

Lane, speaking now to THR of the famed writer’s son, says that Griffin told him at one point that he wanted more for his dad.

“At a certain point, Griffin was talking about a biography of Dominick that he wasn’t crazy about,” Lane said. ”And I finally said, ‘Well, how would you like to see him portrayed? And he said: I would just like people to see that he was more than just the voice of Vanity Fair, that he was this passionate advocate for victims, and that it would all stem from this horrendous trial they had experienced and had changed his life, both personally and professionally.”

One theory that Dominick Dunne established about the Menendez brothers is that they were incestuous lovers — an out-of-left-field notion for many but one that is included in Monsters via some mild innuendo in episode two, and in a scene with the two showering together, that’s caused an uproar from the extended Menendez family, advocates for the brothers and the Menendez brothers themselves. The series may not have telegraphed that this was Dunne’s theory being shown on the screen as clearly as it could have with what co-creator Ryan Murphy called its “Rashomon kind of approach,” but as Lane said of Monsters and other similar series, “one must remind people that it’s a dramatization and not a documentary.”

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is now streaming on Netflix.