Vlad Bunoan

Article (news)

Yong Chavez

ABS-CBN News North America

<div><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A4grqAmcB70?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe> </div>For a long time, Wyatt Russell wasn’t sure acting was his path.“After working for a few years, to be honest,” he answers, when I asked when he realized he wanted to stay in the family business.Though he initially pursued a career as a professional athlete, as the son of Hollywood icons Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Wyatt had grown up around show business. There was even, by his own admission, a kind of inherited confidence. “I went into it going, I think I could be good at it. Call it unearned confidence, but I’ve seen it a lot. That&#x27;s just the benefit of being the son of an actor and actress. The input is there.”But proximity is not the same as purpose so for years, acting was something he tried on rather than committed to.“Working three days on a &#x27;Law &amp; Order&#x27; is not the same as working on a six-week indie film,” he says, describing the difference between passing through a set and belonging to one.The shift came to him on &quot;We Are What We Are,&quot; directed by Jim Mickle. “It gave me purpose and a feeling of meaningfulness on a set,” Wyatt says. “People interacting with each other in a meaningful way that lasts beyond just the movie.”More than anything, that clarified his commitment to the profession. “I was 25, 26. After that film, I really went: Okay, this is exactly what I want to do.”“Never heard you say that before,” Kurt Russell says, chiming in during our interview. He turns toward his son, looking intrigued and pleasantly surprised.Kurt recognizes something in it, perhaps belatedly, as his own path was also similarly interrupted and rerouted. He had a promising career in professional baseball. “That teaches you certain things about grinding,” he says.<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1774604426549KURT RUSSELL Monarch_Photo_020113.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>Kurt Russell. Apple TV</div>But his athletic career was cut short by injury, followed by several uncertain years before he fully committed to acting. “It was three or four years before I finally said: Okay, I guess this is really what I’m going to do,” he recalls. “And I started to look at it differently, applying some of the things that I learned in baseball.”“I’m sure you’ve done the same thing,” he says to Wyatt, who agrees.It is a small but revealing moment: a father discovering not what his son does, but how he came to do it. Some of that dynamic runs through &quot;Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,&quot; where the Russells play the same man, Lee Shaw, across different eras of his life.The Apple TV series has spectacular monster scenes, but the performances hinge on something more intimate: the relationships.Kurt Russell is especially drawn to what the show introduces this season, pointing to an episode that begins to reveal a fault line in Shaw’s character. “There’s a problem with him that you begin to get a little knowledge about. And then you go back to the earlier era, and you begin to see where it came from.”Wyatt Russell, inhabiting the younger version of Shaw, found his way into who Lee Shaw is through a different door: a father.<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1774604468790WYATT RUSSELL Monarch_Photo_020301.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>Wyatt Russell. Apple TV</div>In the second season, Shaw’s relationship with his own father comes into focus. For Wyatt, it was a chance to build something foundational. “It was a very different thing than I had done in the first season,” he says. “It was really fun to build something very different than just chasing monsters. It’s important to see where Lee had come from.”I noted that on-screen, it is Kurt who seems to do most of the action sequences rather than his younger version. Kurt explains why his Lee Shaw seems more feral than Wyatt’s Lee. “He was in a world that we know nothing about for 22 years,” Kurt says. “You don’t really know what happened to him down there. The things that come out of that world are vastly more powerful physically than we are.”That tension between what’s known and what’s been lived but never fully explained is part of what gives Lee Shaw his edge. Across two timelines and two performances, the Russells aren’t just filling in the gaps of a character; they’re building a throughline that makes him consistently interesting. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the spectacle may draw you in, but it’s that layered understanding of the characters that keeps the story grounded.

Wyatt Russell didn’t always see himself as an actor — until one role changed his perspective. Together with Kurt Russell, he opens up about finding purpose, following unexpected paths, and bringing depth to 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.'

Wyatt Russell didn’t always see himself as an actor — until one role changed his perspective. Together with Kurt Russell, he opens up about finding purpose, following unexpected paths, and bringing depth to ' Monarch: Legacy of Monsters .'

Here in Hollywood: Kurt Russell reacts to son Wyatt’s acting revelation in ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’

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Here in Hollywood: Kurt Russell reacts to son Wyatt’s acting revelation in ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’

Yong Chavez,

ABS-CBN News North America

Published March 27, 2026 06:06 PM PHT

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Monarch Legacy of Monsters

Kurt Russell

Wyatt Russell

Apple TV

Yong Chavez

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