While playing the same character at different ages as his real-life son Wyatt Russell in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Kurt Russell admitted after watching Wyatt at work that he realized just how good of a performance his son was delivering, and he’d better bring his own A-game to match it.

Russell was joined on Deadline’s Contenders Television panel by VFX supervisor Sean Conrad and composer Leopold Ross to discuss the Apple TV+ and Legendary Television series – a prequel to the big-screen Monsterverse movies featuring Godzilla and King Kong. He said had the chance to take a good, long look at Wyatt’s acting chops while the two were shooting on parallel schedules.

“We were doing two different crews and I said, ‘I’m going to go check out and see Wyatt’s group was doing,’ ” Kurt recalled. “It was fascinating for me because for the first time, this is my son – I’d known him all my life. He knew me his life, I was an actor. I’d watched him before and I’d been on sets of his and stuff, but in an appreciative sort of way. Now I was suddenly watching this character be laid down that I was going to be the other half of much later in life. And it was really fascinating.”

“I found myself watching this actor and I remember thinking, ‘F*ck, man – this guy’s good. I better get my game going here, because this can’t fall down when it gets to my part of it,’” Kurt laughed.

The shared role marked the first time a well-known father-and-son duo had taken on the same character for a television series. “When we were doing publicity of the show, we found out from a bunch of people who’d looked it up: it’s never been done before. There’s never a known actor there, a father and son, both of them being known, the same role,” said Kurt, who noted that he and Wyatt had previously shared a character on the big screen in the 1998 sci-fi film Soldier.

“Wyatt and I did that in Soldier: he played the character young when he was 12, when the character of Todd was 12, and then I played him later on in life,” said Kurt. “So we’ve actually done it twice.”

Kurt revealed that initially the Russells’ Monarch role, U.S. Army colonel Lee Shaw, was originally less prominent in the storyline until the two actors came aboard. “When we came on, it was just a casting idea: Lee Shaw was in the maybe three or four shows that were being talked about at the time, was really a fifth or sixth character,” he said. “So we had to come up with a reason why Wyatt and I were going to do the show.

“We thought it would be an interesting challenge to maybe do something that would help explain or be very indicative to the audience about what it was we were trying to do with Monarch,” he continued. “Monarch is a what if it’s unlike the movie. It’s a what if this was really happening, I don’t think we’d be too happy about it. We’d be very afraid… This is a bad thing that’s happening. And Monarch is about the people who are dealing with it. And within that there are some monsters too: there are human monsters.”

Kurt said that he and Wyatt were able to collaborate on Shaw’s development and bring the character more to the forefront. “It was really the only place where Wyatt and I got to work together, because that was where we worked on what it was that that Lee Shaw was going to be. It was a lot of fun.”

He also explained that Wyatt was unable to join the panel with a sly plug. “He’s working on a Marvel production right now in Atlanta — I think it’s called Thunderbolts, or something.’”