Cooper Koch
Cooper Koch is an actor, born 1996.
Two small horror films, and then, two years later, one of the most argued-about performances on American television. Cooper Koch has a very short runway. Born in Los Angeles in 1996, he turns up as a child in Fracture in 2007, and the career proper does not begin until 2022, when the slasher They/Them and the body horror Swallowed arrived in the same year. Both are small, both are queer-centred, and both suggest an actor being hired for a particular kind of nerve rather than for conventional leading-man qualities.
Then Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story in 2024, playing Erik Menendez, which changed the scale of everything. It brought him a Primetime Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe nomination, and it dropped him into the middle of a very public argument about dramatising a real crime involving people who are still alive.
The performance is why the argument was worth having. The series is uneven and frequently lurid; his work in it is neither. Playing a real person the audience already has opinions about, he neither solicits sympathy nor refuses it, and the show's most discussed passage is a long unbroken stretch that simply stays on him and lets him talk.
Luca Guadagnino's Artificial is next.
Movies (4)
TV (1)
Where to start with Cooper Koch
There is no point pretending anything else comes first. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is the reason this page has traffic. Go in knowing it is a Ryan Murphy production, so the tone swings hard between tabloid and tragedy, and that the reason to watch is a lead performance holding still while the show around it does not.
For the earlier work, Swallowed is the more interesting of the two 2022 horror films: cheap, claustrophobic and genuinely unpleasant in a way that reads as deliberate. They/Them is the more conventional one, a summer-camp slasher with a good idea it never fully commits to.
Fracture is a footnote, a child part in a sharp thriller. Artificial is the Luca Guadagnino film ahead of him, and the first real test of whether the Menendez attention turns into a career.