Following her reprisal of Iris West in The Flash, the second of the DC movies to come out on the 2023 release schedule, Kiersey Clemons is rounding out her year as one of the main cast members of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. The MonsterVerse TV show available to Apple TV+ subscribers sees the actress playing May, an American hacker who gets drawn into Anna Sawai’s Cate Randa and Ren Watanabe’s Kentaro Randa’s Titan-filled journey uncovering the secrets of the Monarch scientific organization. With two blockbuster franchises under her belt, Clemons explained to me during a recent interview how working on Monarch following her time in the DCEU has been “really gratifying.”
Although our their first taste of Clemons as Iris West in Zack Snyder’s Justice League when it was released to Max subscribers in early 2021, The Flash marked her first time playing the character in a theatrically-released movie, although her screen time was minimal since she wasn’t involved in the main story surrounding Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen. May, on the other hand, is right in the middle of the action on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and when I spoke with the actress on behalf of CinemaBlend while she was with Sawai and Watanabe, here’s what she had to say about what having such an important role in the series means to her:
Very satisfying, as one can imagine. Monarch definitely following The Flash feels really gratifying. I love being a part of the MonsterVerse. So far, the experience that I’ve had has been really exciting and memorable. We’ve made a lot of great memories and traveled to a lot of different places. I enjoy doing the action sequences. I feel like I got stronger. Like, I was doing physical training. [To Anna Sawai] Do you remember when we were walking up those sandbags when we were in the forest a bit? Even stuff like that, or walking up the snow in the glacier in all these layers of clothes. At the end of the day, you really felt that feeling of, ‘Ooh, I hope we’re making a good show because I’m really putting in the work.’ And man, it was so worth it.
Again, Kiersey Clemons was more on the sidelines in The Flash since the movie primarily followed the present-day Barry Allen traveling back to an alternate 2013, where he teamed up with his younger self, Michael Keaton’s Batman and Sasha Calle’s Supergirl. Between that and her screen time in Zack Snyder’s Justice League limited to Barry saving her from a car crash, she wasn’t given much to do in the DCEU. With Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, she wasn’t lacking for exciting and physically-exerting scenes to shoot in various locations around the world. So in addition to that making for a “very satisfying” work experience, Clemons also found herself getting stronger as production chugged along, and what she went though doesn’t sound like any small feat.
As the actress indirectly mentioned, one of the major sequences she was involved with on Monarch was when May, Cate and Kentaro, as well as Kurt Russell’s Lee Shaw, were in Alaska fleeing the Frost Vark, which was the “most challenging” Titan for the show’s VFX team to design. Russell also mentioned this sequence when I spoke with him, saying it reminded him of when he shot The Thing in the early ‘80s. With Monarch at its halfway point, there are still plenty of twists and turns left to explore on this show, including seeing what comes of May secretly contacting Elisa Lasowski’s Duvall agreeing to cooperate with her demands in exchange for finally going home.
New episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters drop Fridays on Apple TV+. Although it remains to be seen if the series will return for a second season, the MonsterVerse will pick back up when Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire hits the 2024 movies schedule on April 12. Those signed up for Max can stream the franchise’s previous four movies, and Netflix subscribers can view the animated series Skull Island.
