Richardson's Matthew Menalo Stars in Waco: The Aftermath

Pretty much every major and minor role in Showtime's new miniseries Waco: The Aftermath carries a heavy weight, because the ramifications of that piece of history are still felt today.

"No matter what side of the story that I get to be on as an actor, I know what the story being told is and the fact that I'm part of telling this story is everything to me," says actor Matthew Menalo, who plays defense attorney Rocket Rosen. "It's a profound story. I understand the weight of this. Understanding the importance of what this story is trying to tell and it's trying to make the people of this country aware that this has actually been brewing in a pressure cooker for a long time. We didn't just magically end up in this political nightmare that we're all toeing the line of today."

Menalo, a Richardson native, lives in New Mexico, where the series was shot. He plays the Houston criminal defense attorney who represented two of the 11 survivors of the Branch Davidian cult charged with the murder of two U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents during the raid on David Koresh's Mount Carmel compound in Waco.

The five-episode series premiered on Showtime in April and its streaming service Paramount+ as a sequel to the 2018 Showtime series showing the events of the deadly 1993 Waco siege that ended after 51 days when a fire started during a raid on the compound. The fire killed 76 of the 85 Branch Davidian members, including 22 children. Four ATF agents died and 20 more were wounded from gunfire exchanged during the standoff, according to the ATF website.

The central story of the series focuses on FBI negotiator Gary Noesner, played by Michael Shannon, who talked with Branch Davidians during the siege and feared the anti-government conspiracies fueled by the events in Waco and the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho in 1992 would produce an event even more destructive. The moment he feared happened two years after Waco, when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols built a bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children, according to FBI reports.

"What's really interesting about all this is not a lot of people are aware of the ramifications of this," Menalo says. "They don't really understand what happened after Mount Carmel burned down. What happened is horrifying and fascinating. Michael Shannon's character sends people undercover to white supremacist territory and because [the federal government] is focusing on foreign terrorism instead of domestic terrorism, that's one of the big takeaway from this. How do we define domestic terrorism?"

Menalo's story is one piece of the definition of domestic terrorism that the series seeks to define. Menalo stars alongside Giovanni Ribisi as Houston defense lawyer Dan Cogdel, who represented Clive Doyle, the Branch Davidian leader who survived the raid and also faced murder and conspiracy charges before a jury acquitted him and 10 of his fellow members. Seven of the defendants were convicted on charges of aiding or abetting voluntary manslaughter and two on weapons charges.

U.S. District Judge Walter Smith threw out the weapons charges against seven of the defendants after receiving acquittals on the conspiracy to commit murder charges because no crime existed to merit having a weapons charge. A month later, he reinstated the weapons charges on the seven defendants, putting them back in prison for terms ranging from 10 to 40 years.

"I'm not trying to say the Branch Davidians were innocent, because they weren't and David Koresh being who was kind of leading these people in a corner or a dead end [is] who's guilty," Menalo says. "Our job in the show is to make sure they stand a chance at a second chance because they were not the militant people. That was David. They were not bloodthirsty. They were not marrying little girls, but they allowed this to happen, and you see that in the show being led by the hand by this psychopath, a self-ingratiated, self-proclaimed messiah."  The production threw him into his character from the moment he stepped onto the set. He didn't have time to meet his fellow cast members. Menalo says he had to jump into Rosen's character with a bracing amount of speed and focus.

"Rocket is kind of unpredictable," Menalo says. "He really shoots from the hip and not really playing ball with the defense team. Rocket's role in the show and just as an actor, I realized my job was to make Giovanni's character look awesome. I make a couple of mistakes and they are good hearted mistakes but it was Rocket's and my job is to paint the picture of what's going on in the defense team and it sets up how Cogdell's approach really saved the day, the lynchpin that brought the defense's argument to the forefront of the case and made the case really tight."

Menalo also says he couldn't help but carry his own memories of the Waco siege and the events that rippled from its tragic ending, especially since he lived an hour and a half away from the site of the siege that captured the attention of the country.

"I remember driving with my dad down to Austin and we'd stop in Waco for a cup of coffee at Common Ground," Menalo says. "I'd have a smoothie, and he'd have a cup of coffee. I had that passing knowledge of Waco, and when I was watching it on TV, I was like, 'Mom, is that where the coffee shop is?' As a 10-year-old, you have no idea what to do with those events. You just know that something's wrong."