Netflix’s hit anthology series, Monster, has garnered significant attention since it debuted in 2022. That high level of buzz is still apparent when it comes to the newest entry in the franchise. Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which is currently available with a Netflix subscription, is No. 1 on Netflix’s Top 10 for TV series, as of this writing. With that, various viewers are watching Charlie Hunnam play the famous killer, who the actor was initially concerned about playing.
Ed Gein is generally seen as one of the darkest human beings to ever live. He’s been the inspiration for fictional killers from Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. This fact wasn’t lost on Charlie Hunnam, who says that he thought he may have made a mistake by agreeing to play such a troubled individual. He tells EW…
Once I said yes to this, I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. I started researching it, reading all the books about Ed Gein, and I fell into a full panic. I just thought there might be no coming back from this. This is so dark, to inhabit this character.
While Ed Gein is only confirmed to have killed two people, he also admitted to stealing corpses from graveyards and fashioning everything from household items to clothing out of various body parts. He made a suit of skin similar to that which was portrayed by the killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Gein’s relationship with his mother, which became obsessive after she died, was even the inspiration for Psycho’s Norman Bates.
Other actors have spoken in the past about the difficulty they’ve had playing particularly dark characters. It’s not all that surprising that Hunnam would be concerned about that. Evan Peters, who previously played Jeffrey Dahmer in the first season of Monster, has been candid about the difficulties and complexities that came with that character. The brutal scenes he had to play out on camera might have been quite vicious. Hunnam admits that he’s not really a horror fan, and said yes to the role over dinner with creator Ryan Murphy almost entirely because he liked Murphy.
The good news, for Charlie Hunnam, was that when he finally saw the scripts for the series, they revealed that he wouldn’t need to do a lot of the worst stuff on camera, as the series was going to be less about what happened and more about attempting to understand why. Hunnam continued…
There was sort of a breakthrough when I started reading the scripts and realizing that we were not going to be focusing on what he did and doing a deep dive on that, we’re really gonna be focusing on why he did what he did and trying to find the human being behind the monster.
While investigating why Ed Gein became the man he did almost certainly made for its own darkness, it seems it was more in line with what Hunnam was comfortable doing. And, based on the popularity of the series on Netflix right now, it appears Hunnam’s efforts weren’t in vain.