“Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.” Sometimes, to talk about Kong, you have to quote Kafka.
At least that’s how it is with actor Mari Yamamoto, who plays the brilliant, time-displaced scientist Keiko Randa on the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. Godzilla, Kong, and (this season) a sea creature called Titan X are all over the Apple TV series, sure. But this spinoff of the MonsterVerse films is just as much about Keiko’s bond with her late son Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira), her granddaughter Cate (Anna Sawai), and her beautiful, painful love for two men, scientist Bill Randa (Anders Holm) and Col. Lee Shaw (played at different times by Wyatt Russell and his father, Kurt Russell).
So during when Yamamoto quotes a letter about love and loss that Franz Kafka is reported to have written to a little girl when he gave her a doll to replace one she’d lost, it wasn’t out of left field. Monarch really is that kind of show. But it’s also one where she has to drive a jeep at breakneck speeds to avoid being crushed by Kong’s mighty feet as she races to save her granddaughter’s life — a topic which, to the best of my knowledge, Kafka never touched.
During a Zoom interview earlier this week, Yamamoto spoke about the unique blend of love and monsters that makes Monarch one of the best sci-fi shows on television, and explained the factors that go into making her performance one of the best on the show.
DECIDER: When I tell people about Monarch, I always say the same thing: “The Godzilla vs. Kong TV show is the most romantic thing on television.” But the finale also demonstrates it’s about big monster action. As a performer, you’re handling both the popcorn creature-feature stuff and complicated matters of the human heart. How do you keep both sides of that in your mind at the same time?
MARI YAMAMOTO: For me, this has always been a love story. I don’t mean that just in a romantic sense. Everything is a love story, right? Keiko’s love of monsters is also like a love story. It all started from there.
In this journey of playing Keiko, I really had to figure out what these monsters mean to her. I came to the conclusion that the monsters represent this bigger love for her out there. Thinking about her backstory, anybody who experienced World War II comes through with a set of losses. That set her on a path of, “How do I make this life worth it for the people who didn’t make it?” That’s why she’s become who she is.
At the same time, seeing a monster makes you think, “If monsters are possible, what else is possible?” There’s a hope attached to it. The love that she has for the people and the monsters and the science is what travels across time with her into the modern day, and that’s what she anchors herself in.
So much of this season is about the Keiko’s bond with her granddaughter, Cate, in the modern day. You spend much of the finale risking your life to save hers. What connected those two characters besides blood?
From the get-go, their experience is so trauma-bonding: They find each other in Axis Mundi and they make it out together. Cate’s the one who convinces her that they need her and to come back to the modern day. They lose Hiroshi together, then they go on this mission together.
Keiko’s mindset, and also Cate’s, is guilt-ridden. After losing Hiroshi, Keiko doesn’t quite know what to live for anymore, so she’s made peace with leaving this earth if she can be of use in some way. But going through all this together with Cate, she finds somebody to love, and that gives her purpose again.
I loved that scene in episode seven where Keiko is trying to stop Cate from going into the well, because she’s beating herself up over [her decision to do something similar decades earlier]. Cate tells her, “What else were you going to do? You had to. You had to find out.” Keiko has never felt so seen — relieved of her sins, in a way. Her granddaughter is telling her “You did what you were meant to do.” That was such an emotional moment for me.
In the finale, when she sees young Lee through the rift, it used to be [in the script] that she has to choose whether to go back to him or stay. They cut that bit, but she chooses Cate. I loved that so much.
Besides being personally courageous and generous of spirit, Keiko is a scientific genius. Is her brilliance a burden?
I think Keiko is a cursed character, if you look at the facts. Right? She loses everything all the time, and terrible things happen to the people she loves. Somehow she has the optimism to keep going and make sense of it all. At the same time, somebody asked me this great question: Keiko’s name is spelled as “blessed child” in Japanese characters. So they were like, “Do you think she’s blessed?” I think she’s actually cursed, but she has the power to turn it all into blessings somehow. That’s who she is.
There’s a parallel in Cate. She has this power inside of her and uses it for good, to give herself relief and closure from all the grief that she feels. We see this dynamic with Billy and Keiko: Billy’s the one who has these crazy ideas, and Keiko’s like, “No, it’s not crazy, it’s brilliant.” Cate is also saying “Is this crazy?”, and Keiko is like “No, it’s not.”
So I don’t think she feels pressure in being brilliant. I think she harnesses it. She’s the biggest believer of all! She’s a believer in miracles. If anyone can believe in miracles, it’s scientists. Everything they study, from human bodies to the planets, is like one tiny miracle after another. She has this immense power to believe in miracles. That’s her brilliance.
That idea that Keiko is both cursed and blessed feels like an echo of Godzilla himself. He can be curse or a blessing, a destroyer or a protector, from one appearance to the next. The Monarch team is like that: Are they a blessing to the world because of their thirst for knowledge and exploration, or are they a curse because of what they’ve unleashed or failed to prevent? That’s how I’ve made sense of the show: The monsters and the humans feel the same to me.
I love that. It reminds me of the writers of the show saying “Who is the monster here, really? Legacy of Monsters: Is it about us?” We all have our sins, and if we’re lucky we get to atone for them. We’re constantly being asked “What path will you choose?” in this universe because the stakes are so high all the time. You could die at any moment, and you’re always making choices that are going to affect so many people. So yeah, I think you’re completely right — that’s the theme that runs through. All of us have the potential to become monsters, if given the opportunity, and this season really explored that.
I’m sorry about how heavy this is going to sound—
I love heavy.
That’s a relief. You’d mentioned Keiko and Cate bonding over the loss of Hiroshi, Keiko’s son and Cate’s father. During the stretch of episodes that contained Hiroshi’s death and funeral, my own father died. I have have kind of a big messy family—
[Laughs] Don’t we all?
Well, yeah! So it was cathartic to watch a show where the death of the loved one didn’t instantly bring everyone together and solve everyone’s problems. For Keiko, she’s grieving the loss of a son she didn’t even really get to know.
It really resonates, because I lost my father, too. It was right after wrapping Season 1. When we were shooting Season 2, I was actively grieving. [Tearing up] I’ll try not to cry, but it was a really tough season, because all Keiko’s doing is grieving. It’s so in parallel with my life.
But I was really looking for signs. Some people do that when they experience loss, right? Like, “Send me a sign.” Meanwhile, I’m annoying, because I’m always pitching the writers theme and things Keiko could say. I kept saying, “I think Keiko would look for signs from Billy. Can we have something from him? Can it be a letter?” That culminated in all the letters he sent through the rifts.
A hugely romantic image.
And with Hiroshi’s death, my first thought was, What would Keiko do in that moment? I love working with Takahiro Hiroshi, he’s just so brilliant and I love him so much. We had a few scenes, and one I loved was a little scene where she’s like, “Don’t bite your nails” and stuff like that. So what she’s going to do in that moment to make up for lost time? My thought was, She’s going to try to comfort him. She’s going to sing a song to him that she sang to him as a baby.
I asked the writers, and I found this song, which is of my dad’s generation, a song that everybody knew and sang at school. It’s called “Furusato,” which is the title of the episode, and it means home, homeland — your metaphorical home. The lyrics are “Mother, father, where are you?” It speaks to all of them. Cate is a person who keeps losing her home. Hiroshi, Keiko —they all repeatedly lose their homes because of the monsters, and because of the people around them, too. So it felt really fitting to try to recreate that home for him in his last moments. Because of all the things I was going through personally at the time, it was emotional.
I remember that scene well — that was the day I told everyone “The Godzilla show made me cry.” But several of the Godzilla movies are very moving films, of course. Scenes like that prove kaiju are just a tool, and you can do almost anything you want with them, like any other genre.
Absolutely. That’s what we’re really trying to do: not just be a monster spectacle show, because the more you flesh out and explore the characters, the harder the kaiju stuff hits. The stakes are so much higher, and they have more meaning. I’m glad that comes through, because we work really hard to do it. As shitty as these people may seem, they’re so real.
It reminds me of Andor in that way.
I was gonna say! When I watched Andor, I really thought to myself, Could I be this brave? Could I be the person to do something? I thought it was beautiful that a sci-fi, Star Wars thing made me question that. If I do a MonsterVerse show that can make people think, Would I be brave? How would I help? — I think that’s incredible. For me personally, I don’t think I’d be brave. I think I’d run and try to be useful later. That’s my philosophy. [Laughs]
I think when everything feels so difficult and heavy, it’s important to see people with an unbending, relentless moral compass. You know, I’m an actor. I don’t think I’m changing the world. But I do believe it’s important to tell stories about people who are good at their jobs and brilliant and striving to do the right thing, even if they don’t always succeed.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.