NEW YORK – Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters takes place after the events of the 2014 movie Godzilla, which culminated in an epic battle between the titular sea monster and two other ancient behemoths.

Debuting on Apple TV+ on Friday, the series follows a young woman named Cate (Anna Sawai) – who survived Godzilla’s attack on San Francisco in that film – and her brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe) as they set out to learn more about their late father.

They discover his hidden connection to Monarch, a secretive agency tasked with studying and monitoring these massive creatures, and this leads them to a soldier named Lee Shaw, who has a long history with the organisation.

Lee is played by two actors over the span of five decades: Kurt Russell, the 72-year-old American star who was most recently seen in the Fast & Furious film franchise (2015 to 2021) and superhero film Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), and his 37-year-old son Wyatt Russell, who appeared in the superhero series The Falcon And The Winter Soldier (2021).

Speaking at an event in New York earlier in 2023, Monarch showrunner Chris Black and fellow executive producer Matt Fraction, with whom he co-developed it, discussed this multi-generational casting coup and the key role it plays in the story.

Says Black: “We said early on that we couldn’t make a show that’s just about monsters. It had to be a show about people that happen to live in a world where monsters are real.

“So the focus was always on the human story we wanted to tell.”

The American writer and producer, who has worked on series such as Severance (2022 to present), adds: “It’s about a multi-generational family saga – and we were lucky enough to get Kurt and Wyatt to come in and play a character that spans the generations and links those two stories together.”

The Russells had turned down paired roles before, Black reveals.

“They were really intrigued by this idea. They had been offered roles where they would play father and son before, and that wasn’t that exciting (to them).

“But the idea of (playing) the same character in different time periods was something they had never been presented before, and that they were excited about.”

The Russells then collaborated closely to sync up their performances, often reading each other’s scenes and swopping notes.

The two actors would also give the writers and other creators “script notes on each other’s scenes”, Black recalls.

“And we would be, like, ‘Wait, that’s not your scene’, and then you’d have to remind yourself, ‘Oh, but it’s the same character’.”

Fraction says the show will be more character-driven than the dozens of Godzilla movies that anchor the franchise, which began with the iconic Japanese-language Godzilla (1954) and now includes four Hollywood films, from Godzilla (1998) to Godzilla Vs. Kong (2021).

“There’s this amazing world and this cool myth with lots of question marks, and (the question) was how do we build a compelling story about real people moving through that that isn’t the same thing as the films,” says the American writer, who penned award-winning comics such as Marvel’s The Invincible Iron Man (2008).

The show will, however, strike a balance between that and the monster action Godzilla fans love.

Black promises that the giant beasts are still “an absolutely critical and fun part of what this world is”.

“But if we couldn’t tell a story driven by these human characters that people wanted to watch, the show wouldn’t work.”

And the real story here is about family relationships and legacies rather than the monsters themselves.

“This series is about trauma,” Black says. “If you look at Cate from the very beginning, she is suffering from post-traumatic stress.

“But what I hope we reveal at the end is that the monster, the source of her trauma, isn’t Godzilla – it’s her father, it’s abandonment.

“It’s that when she needed family and the support of her father, at the most critical time of her life, he wasn’t there to give it.”

And so what starts out looking like a show about surviving a monster attack turns out “to be much deeper and much more personal than that”, Black says.

• Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday.