After spending four episodes revealing the difficult lives of Lyle and Erik Menendez, Netflix undergoes an intense change of style in the fifth episode.

The 33-minute installment, titled “The Hurt Man,” unfolds in a single take in which Erik (Cooper Koch) gives a detailed, emotional account of the child abuse he suffered. Erik’s speech takes place after he and his brother are arrested for the murder of their parents Jose and Kitty (Javier Bardem and Chloe Sevigny), during a conversation with his lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor).

It’s a notable divergence for the series, which splits its nine-episode season with a significantly shorter episode that continually puts the spotlight on Erik to express the darkness at the heart of the story – but also leaves him dependent on the support of his older brother Lyle (Nicholas Chávez). In her review of the series diversity Television critic Aramide Tinubu called “The Hurt Man” a “standout” of the series and the culmination of an “excellent” first half of the story.

With no cuts or edits in the episode and the character Abramson only seen from behind, “Monsters” rests on Koch’s shoulders for 36 minutes.

“We shot it eight times — four times a day, for two days,” Graynor said. “We had a lot of rehearsals planned. Cooper and I had performed it a few times on our own, just to say it out loud, and then we did it in rehearsal. I think we had both spent so much time preparing and cared so much about it that we came in the room and did it once and Michael Uppendahl, our incredible director, said, ‘Let’s not rehearse it, let’s do it just rotate.’”

Koch remembered the rehearsal: “It was so beautiful. It went better than I could have imagined.”

However, he didn’t feel that way when they shot the first two takes. “I went to Michael and said, ‘I need help.’ “I have to figure out why I’m not unlocking it or what I’m not getting,” Koch recalls. “And he says, ‘You’re chasing the dragon, you’re chasing the dragon of this first rehearsal.’ So go to the next one and just be open to Ari. Be open to what she will say. Find light in everything you can and try to defend your parents. That really opened everything up. After the third shot I felt great.”

The eighth and final shot is the one shown in the episode. “Watching Cooper do it was extraordinary and we pulled it off every time. We never stopped, there were no problems,” Graynor said. “It was completely different every time. I think we both knew what an incredible gift it was as actors, and also this episode was so much bigger than us. We just wanted to leave room for Erik’s story and for me as Leslie to model the kind of listening and love that I think she has for him.”

Koch became emotional while talking about working with Graynor. “The fact that you don’t see her face, you just hear her voice and she carries him through the whole thing and gives him space, Ari just makes her so generous with her performances,” he said, wiping tears from his face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This happens every time I talk about her.”

Murphy said he and co-creator Ian Brennan were determined to let Erik tell his side of the story. “Everything he says there was either based on things he had said, written, spoken, transcripts, etc., so it was very much his point of view,” he explained. “When we wrote it, I thought the most effective way to do this would be to do it all at once, so you couldn’t look away. You just couldn’t look away.”

Murphy said “you could hear a pin drop” while they were filming the shots. He praised Graynor’s performance as an “incredible supporting role”.

“They were both so committed to what they were talking about and gave victims of sexual abuse their day in court, so to speak,” he said.

Shortly after the series premiered on Netflix, Erik criticized Monsters and Murphy for the show’s “destructive character portrayals” of him and his brother. The siblings are currently serving life sentences at the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California, after being convicted of murdering their parents in 1996.

In his interview with diversityMurphy defended the series, saying the show was “the best thing that’s happened to the brothers in ’30 years.’

Koch met the brothers during a prison visit with Kim Kardashian after the series premiere. He believes the brothers deserve a retrial: “I really hope they get paroled and have a great rest of their lives.”