I’m sorry about how heavy this is going to sound—

I love heavy.

That’s a relief. You’d mentioned Keiko and Cate bonding over the loss of Hiroshi, Keiko’s son and Cate’s father. During the stretch of episodes that contained Hiroshi’s death and funeral, my own father died. I have have kind of a big messy family—

[Laughs] Don’t we all?

Well, yeah! So it was cathartic to watch a show where the death of the loved one didn’t instantly bring everyone together and solve everyone’s problems. For Keiko, she’s grieving the loss of a son she didn’t even really get to know.

It really resonates, because I lost my father, too. It was right after wrapping Season 1. When we were shooting Season 2, I was actively grieving. [Tearing up] I’ll try not to cry, but it was a really tough season, because all Keiko’s doing is grieving. It’s so in parallel with my life. 

But I was really looking for signs. Some people do that when they experience loss, right? Like, “Send me a sign.” Meanwhile, I’m annoying, because I’m always pitching the writers theme and things Keiko could say. I kept saying, “I think Keiko would look for signs from Billy. Can we have something from him? Can it be a letter?” That culminated in all the letters he sent through the rifts. 

A hugely romantic image.

And with Hiroshi’s death, my first thought was, What would Keiko do in that moment? I love working with Takehiro Hira, he’s just so brilliant and I love him so much. We had a few scenes, and one I loved was a little scene where she’s like, “Don’t bite your nails” and stuff like that. So what she’s going to do in that moment to make up for lost time? My thought was, She’s going to try to comfort him. She’s going to sing a song to him that she sang to him as a baby. 

I asked the writers, and I found this song, which is of my dad’s generation, a song that everybody knew and sang at school. It’s called “Furusato,” which is the title of the episode, and it means home, homeland — your metaphorical home. The lyrics are “Mother, father, where are you?” It speaks to all of them. Cate is a person who keeps losing her home. Hiroshi, Keiko —they all repeatedly lose their homes because of the monsters, and because of the people around them, too. So it felt really fitting to try to recreate that home for him in his last moments. Because of all the things I was going through personally at the time, it was emotional. 

I remember that scene well — that was the day I told everyone “The Godzilla show made me cry.” But several of the Godzilla movies are very moving films, of course. Scenes like that prove kaiju are just a tool, and you can do almost anything you want with them, like any other genre.

Absolutely. That’s what we’re really trying to do: not just be a monster spectacle show, because the more you flesh out and explore the characters, the harder the kaiju stuff hits. The stakes are so much higher, and they have more meaning. I’m glad that comes through, because we work really hard to do it. As shitty as these people may seem, they’re so real. 

I interviewed actor Mari Yamamoto, aka Keiko Randa, about her work on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.