Nicholas Alexander Chavez Can Take The Heat

Nicholas Alexander Chavez got a warning from Ryan Murphy: “It’ll get noisy for you.”

Murphy, the prolific television impresario, had cast Chavez in two of his shows — Netflix’s true-crime anthology series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story and FX’s horror-drama Grotesquerie — and was explaining that both would be dropping within days of each other. That meant that Chavez, whose biggest role up until that point had been a formative stint on General Hospital, would suddenly be thrust into the limelight.

What Murphy foretold came to pass in September, when audiences met Chavez as the volatile Lyle in Monsters and the lascivious fitness trainer/priest Charlie Mayhew in Grotesquerie. With his heavy brows and an intensity that courses through his angular face, the 25-year-old actor has become an object of fascination both on TikTok, where fans make swooning edits of him, and in real life, where he gets stopped for selfies on the regular. And he’s happy to oblige — his girlfriend, Victoria Abbott, who also appeared on Grotesquerie, might even take the photo for you if you’re really lucky. A Chappell Roan type he is not: When we meet up at his hotel in New York’s Flatiron district in mid-November, he appears to be basking in the attention, and charmingly so.

“More than anything, it’s just really exciting to see other people’s reaction and responses,” Chavez says. “When I get to walk down the street and see people get excited and run up to me and ask to take a photo, it’s just fun because you get to be a part of a positive experience for that person on that day, and you give them a fun story to tell.”

Chavez is excitable and slightly overwhelmed when he arrives in the lobby for our interview. He apologizes profusely — he is, after all, over a half an hour late, and he called me flushed and contrite when he realized he lost track of time. But I get the endearing sense that floating through life is his default state. Later, when I ask him when he’s due to film the new sequel to the slasher classic I Know What You Did Last Summer, he tells me a few weeks, then says, “Wait, no, I fly to Sydney in three days. Just kidding.” For real? “Yeah, I swear,” he answers, before adding coyly, “Shh, don’t tell anyone.”

Chavez, dressed in an oversize blue sweater with a white collar peeking out, seems younger than he does on screen, his mussy hair giving him a boyish air. When a server stops by to take his drink order, Chavez asks for a Red Bull. They don’t have any, so he instead goes for a half-caf cup of coffee, a funny choice considering that, just a few moments earlier, he was itching for the drink that gives you wings. He shifts in his seat as he talks but also takes long pauses to make sure he gets his answer correct — a young actor getting used to the new megaphone of stardom.

“There are parts of that show that feel blasphemous, but at the same time, I’m an artist, and I’ve been tasked with tackling a script and a world.”

Acting was a life he was practically drafted into. Born in Texas but raised in Colorado, Chavez was a bit of a contradiction in high school — a “nerd” who wasn’t a great student, a football player who also competed on the nationally ranked speech and debate team. When his speech coach took over the theater department, he cast Chavez as a last-minute replacement for the part of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Chavez’s star quality was immediately apparent. “The faculty came up to me after that show and they said, ‘You know, Nick, we’re not super familiar with who you are and what you’re about, because you don’t really bother to come to our classes, but you really ought to consider doing this as, like, your job,’” he tells me.

Making that happen came in fits and starts. After high school, he enrolled in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers in New Jersey but didn’t click with the program and dropped out after his sophomore year. He moved to Los Angeles to try to find work, but when COVID hit, he relocated to Florida, where his dad was living, and worked as a door-to-door life insurance agent and car salesman. “I just sort of bumped and bruised my way through life until someone decided to give me a job,” he says.

That first job was General Hospital, which he likens to “boot camp” given the breakneck filming schedule of soaps and the kind of kooky plot lines they tackle. (Across the 350-plus episodes he appeared in between 2021 and 2024, Chavez’s character, Prince Spencer Cassadine, had many brushes with the law.) So when the audition for Monsters came along, he was ready to go a little Method.

While researching the brothers — who were convicted of murdering their wealthy parents in 1989 and whose case is being revisited (with support from Kim Kardashian) — Chavez realized the home where the killings took place was less than a mile from where he was staying in Los Angeles. “I made the walk over there, and I just looked at it, and I took it all in with what I knew about the case, which is comparatively very, very, very, very little than what I know now,” he says. “I remember feeling in the energy that there was something about this audition that was very special.”

“How people enjoy entertainment is ultimately a freedom of expression that’s their own. It’s not up to you to mandate how someone enjoys something.”

Chavez, who describes himself as having an “obsessive” personality, was all in the role from the jump. During his final callback, he threw his co-star Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menendez, into one of Murphy’s vintage chairs and broke it. (Koch was fine with that: “Afterwards, he’s like smiling ear to ear,” Chavez clarifies.) Then, before shooting, Chavez did a deep dive on the crime — the only thing he didn’t watch were other dramatic interpretations — before holing up in an Airbnb in Joshua Tree. “I slowly slipped and eclipsed into madness as I played ’80s and ’90s music,” he says, almost a little too seriously, describing how he’d pace around the house while reciting lines.

Chavez thought of Lyle — who claims he was sexually abused by his father, music-industry executive Jose — as an adult trapped in the mindset of a 10-year-old. He saw the hairpiece Lyle wore as a symbol of the mask he wears. “It’s no surprise that as the mask begins to slip, he’s forced to confront who he really is, which is not someone with a perfect head of hair,” Chavez says, “but then also potentially a really, really deeply damaged, f*cked-up human being with an insane amount of trauma and emotional turmoil to deal with.”

So how does Chavez then feel about his work on the show being used for TikTok fodder? He responds with a very diplomatic answer.

“I think you have to ultimately recognize that what we’re creating is entertainment, and how people enjoy entertainment and how people entertain themselves is ultimately a freedom of expression that’s their own,” he says. “Everyone will take something different from what you create. It’s not up to you to mandate how someone enjoys something. I think just the fact that they are enjoying it in whatever capacity they deem appropriate is sufficiently fulfilling for me.”

He’s still figuring out how to participate. To promote the Grotesquerie finale, he posted a series of photos and videos to Instagram from the set featuring the bloody, barely there, Jesus-like costume he dons during a shocking reveal in the episode. He captioned the post “BRAT supper” — in one clip, he did the viral Charli XCX “Apple” dance — but took it down after some comments called it disrespectful. Of the images, he says, “I guess that’s just my sense of humor.” (“Omar Apollo told me to put it back up,” he adds with a laugh. They’re new pals: “We just started hanging out the other night. He’s a cool guy.”)

And yet Chavez understands that Grotesquerie, a twisty series involving a rash of heinous killings, is designed to push buttons, including his own sometimes. In one scene, for instance, Father Charlie self-flagellates wearing assless chaps.

“It put me in kind of a weird headspace because I grew up going to Masses,” says Chavez, who is not a practicing Catholic but was confirmed in the church. “And there are parts of that show that feel blasphemous, but at the same time, I’m an artist, and I’ve been tasked with tackling a script and a world, and I’m always [more] open to what the project can teach me about myself as an artist than I am concerned about something else.”

Even after breaking out with such intense roles, he wants to keep pushing himself. Describing his dream roles, Chavez says he is drawn to “romantic movies” but adds that he doesn’t mean “romantic” in a literal sense. “It could be dark as hell,” he offers, “but somehow it’s imbued with a romance that makes you see the world as fundamentally beautiful — even if it’s terrifying, even if it’s nasty.”

As our conversation winds down, he tells me about his plans for the rest of the day, including dinner at the famed Sushi Nakazawa for dinner and then some more “clandestine” — his word — excursions later in the night. “Catch me in the depths of Brooklyn’s underbelly,” he says, mischievously.

No doubt somebody will. Just after he leaves, a woman walks by our table and asks the question trailing him everywhere these days: “Was he the guy from Netflix?”

Esther Zuckerman is the author of A Field Guide to Internet Boyfriends: Meme-Worthy Celebrity Crushes from A to Z. Her latest book, Falling in Love at the Movies: Rom-Coms from the Screwball Era to Today, is out Dec. 3.