‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ star Mari Yamamoto on the show’s emotional finale [Exclusive Video Interview]
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This piece contains spoilers about “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”
Even now, months after she wrapped production on Season 1 of “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” breakout star Mari Yamamoto gets admittedly emotional while talking about the show’s finale.
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The actress plays Keiko Mura, a Japanese scientist who, in the 1950s, helped start the organization Monarch alongside Bill Randa (Anders Holm) and Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) to understand and study Godzilla and other Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms (MUTOs). But after a mission gone wrong, Keiko is presumed dead and is only later discovered to have survived, barely aged for decades, within a part of Hollow Earth she’s coined Axis Mundi. It’s there, in the show’s finale, where Keiko reunites with an elder Lee (now played by Kurt Russell, Wyatt’s father) and realizes that her 57 days spent in Axis Mundi have translated to literal decades on Earth.
“She hears this voice and she’s been hearing it in her head, Lee’s voice, the whole time – but it doesn’t match up,” Yamamoto tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “So little things start to become wonky. And then I think we focused on the scientist and the human part of her brain. She receives the news and her analytical mind is trying to keep it together. ‘Of course, gravitational distortion in Axis Mundi would affect time. Of course that happens. But then the human part of her – I’m getting emotional talking about – is like, ‘What are you talking about? None of that matters. You’ve lost everything.’ I think we wanted to sort of be able to show that. And then when she sees Lee, there is that shock, but at the same time, she hasn’t felt person’s hand in almost two months. And how does that feel? And it’s just really taking it moment by moment of seeing him. And it’s him, but it’s not him. So how does that feel?”
Set across two timelines and created by Chris Black and Matt Fraction, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” expands upon the MonsterVerse franchise of films that launched with 2014’s “Godzilla.” The show takes place in the aftermath of the events depicted in that film – including the destruction of San Francisco – with flashbacks to the 1950s when Keiko, Lee, and Bill join forces to start Monarch. (Befitting the title, Keiko’s son plays a key part in the story, as do her grandchildren.)
Yamamoto says becoming a part of the MonsterVerse was an “exciting prospect” because of how important Godzilla is as a pop-culture figure in Japan. But Keiko in particular was a character she found exceedingly compelling. “I just fell in love with her. She was just somebody I’ve never seen on screen before, especially as a Japanese woman,” Yamamoto explains. “She’s this adventurous, smart, and flawed character with so many layers that you could peel back. And with such an interesting backstory, we don’t really explicitly see it in the show. But she comes from so much loss and the trauma of World War II, but she still has this inner light. There’s an optimism that really shines through, I think, for me. So all of those things came together. And I was just invested in her from the get-go.”
Yamamoto also connected to Keiko’s inquisitive and questioning nature thanks to her background as a reporter. (She worked with Jake Adelstein in Japan and served as an associate producer on “Tokyo Vice,” the series based on Adelstein’s work.)
“It’s written that she’s super smart and she knows everything, but you can’t play smart, right?” she says. “So I was focused on her curiosity and her thought process. And that really is who I am. I too am such a curious person. I just want to know everything about the person sitting in front of me. I don’t do well in interviews, I feel, because I’m just trying to talk to the person instead of answering questions and talking about myself. So I think all of those things, how I’ve lived my life, and the jobs I’ve done before, came in handy to play this person because I know what it’s like to be on the hunt for the truth in a way. And that’s her drive. That’s all she’s about. So I definitely related to her at like a core level.”
Keiko manages to escape Axis Mundi in the “Monarch” finale – although not before suffering another loss, as Lee appears to die to help facilitate her return to the Earth’s surface. She reunites with her long-lost son, now an adult even older than her and battling his own demons – including his infidelity that led to a second family and double life – and she also meets her grandchildren for the first time.
“We didn’t really get to Keiko processing that these are her grandkids at all. So how does that relation play out?” Yamamoto says when asked about her hopes for Season 2 of “Monarch.” (Apple renewed the show earlier this year.) “That’s a really interesting angle because her grandkids know more about the modern world than she does. And of course, her relationship with her son. How is she going to react to the news that he’s two-timing? He’s become a terrible person, right? So, as a mother, maybe she has empathy because she maybe she feels it’s her fault and all these things. I also think her biggest love is science. She has 60 years of science to catch up on. So that’s really exciting.”
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” streams on Apple TV+.
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