Charlie Hunnam looked effortlessly stylish in Saint Laurent as he attended the 5th Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles, California, on October 18th. You can browse photos from the event in the gallery below:
On October 14th, Charlie alongside many other cast members were spotted on the set of Season 4 of Monster, which is focusing on Lizzie Borden. Charlie was seen in full costume as Lizzie Borden’s father, Andrew Borden. As you can see from the photos, Charlie looks almost unrecognizable!
Are you excited for this next installment of Monster?
Manabouttown.tv — A rumbling train drowns out Charlie Hunnam just as he’s about to reveal the project he wishes he’d never taken. He laughs at the interruption, then doubles back – this time confessing the role he auditioned for but, thankfully, didn’t land. Before he can utter the project’s name, another blaring locomotive barrels past, silencing him again. “That train is my publicist!” he yells with a grin. “Preventing me from saying things I shouldn’t.”
Many people are lucky, but there’s more to it with Hunnam. Just a fleeting moment with him is enough to make you believe in karma, since karmic law tells us good things happen to good people, and, well, Charlie Hunnam is apparently very good. Hunnam is the kind of good that, instead of being tended to by a full staff, cleans his own home, pays his own bills, shops for his own groceries – despite being an international screen mainstay since his 2008 worldwide breakthrough as Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy. “Fuck the glitz and glamour, hit ‘em with the Blitz and Hammer,” he says, quoting noughties UK rap legend Dizzee Rascal. Good like, when homophobia held strong through the 1990s, Hunnam attended equal rights demonstrations. “I was quite popular [there],” he smiles, although he probably understates. He’s so good that in this interview – one of many in which he will participate to promote his role as one of history’s most infamous serial killers in one of television’s most popular franchises – Hunnam is happily chatting well beyond our scheduled time, in direct defiance of his publicist (his officially appointed one, rather than the train).
Ed Gein, the actor’s latest lead role, was a two-time 1950s killer also famous for exhuming corpses, including that of his own mother. He has been the real-life inspiration for Norman Bates in Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and now, Ryan Murphy’s exceedingly bingeable anthology series, Monster. The collaboration between Murphy and Hunnam was borne out of a two-hour lunch at Chateau Marmont, during which the former offered the Englishman the role on the spot. According to the star, it was a “mic drop” moment, and Hunnam instinctively accepted – script unseen. Over the next few weeks, the impostor syndrome had set in: “‘I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do if I can’t understand this guy,’” he thought.
But Murphy had done extensive research, presenting a show that unfurled mental illness with profound compassion. Hunnam approached the work in a similar vein, devouring any material that gave insight into Gein’s environment, activities and pathology. “I was thinking, ‘Why did he do what he did? How can I make him a human?’ He did horrendous things, but it’s also heartbreaking… I did find him to be a really tragic figure.”
Identifying with his characters – no matter their background, occupation, or sexuality – has become something of Hunnam’s superpower. Before roaring onto screens as Jax, the motorcycle gang leader in Sons of Anarchy, Hunnam was a 16-year-old from the Newcastle suburb of Byker (yes, really). He’d just been turned away by an acting agency when fate intervened: on Christmas Eve 1996, he happened to cross paths with the lone production manager of the only TV show filming within 200 miles. That chance meeting led to his first audition – 1999’s Queer As Folk, Russell T Davies’s groundbreaking drama about three gay friends in Manchester.
Queer As Folk ran for only two seasons, but its impact was seismic, cited as part of the cultural conversation that prompted the UK government to bring the age of consent for gay relationships in line with that of straight and lesbian couples in 2001. Hunnam, one of its three stars, was just 18 when it premiered.
“I was certainly aware when it came out that we felt like we were doing something important,” he says. “Prior to that show a gay character on television’s entire storyline was that they were HIV positive or something like that – always reductive, like ‘This is all this person is.’ [Our] show was about three human beings living their lives with a whole plethora of relatable, real-life issues who just happened to be gay.” Continue reading Press: Charlie Hunnam On Facing The Monster
InterviewMagazine.com — Charlie Hunnam has played gangsters, bikers, and bruised antiheroes, but nothing could prepare him for crawling into the skin of America’s original psycho, Ed Gein. In the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s Monster series, the British actor descended into the psyche of the killer who inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs—and he didn’t walk away unscathed. To mark the moment, Hunnam and Murphy reunited for a debrief on what it takes to find some heart in the darkness.
WEDNESDAY 5 PM AUG. 13, 2025 LA
RYAN MURPHY: Hello!
CHARLIE HUNNAM: Hey, Ryan.
MURPHY: What’s happening?
HUNNAM: We’re here!
MURPHY: Good to see you. So Charlie, why don’t you start asking me questions? I’m always asking you questions.
HUNNAM: Let’s start with the big one. What scares you, Mr. Murphy?
MURPHY: God, what scares me? I don’t really have an answer to that, other than the typical stuff about something happening to my family. Horror things don’t scare me. I’m more afraid of natural disasters—tsunamis, earthquakes, things like that. And yet I’m also drawn to watching videos about them. What scares you?
HUNNAM: It’s a difficult question, which I thought was reason for us to discuss it. I think time? I have an unhealthy, or maybe an ultra-healthy, appreciation for time. I get most anxious when I feel like I’m not using it judiciously. I’m 45 now and realizing if I’m going to get through this long list of ambitions and hopes and desires, whether it be taking photographs again or starting a family—
MURPHY: I started a family at 45, so I get that. What’s one thing other than a family that you need to get done in your lifetime?
HUNNAM: I’ve got a lot of creative things that I still want to do and a lot of stories that I’d like to tell as a writer, that I would also like to act in. I’d like to travel a lot more than I have, and not in the context of work but in the context of true adventure. I’ve done that only once before, where I went to India with a hotel booked for one night and no plan beyond that. I wanted to just go where the country took me. It was everything I hoped it would be, both the good and the bad.
MURPHY: I love that. I’ve worked with a lot of people at this point in my career, and you were always on my bucket list, whether you know that or not. We were younger gents in the early FX days. I was doing Nip/Tuck and then American Horror Story, and you were doing Sons of Anarchy. So I always saw you across the crowded room and did the show business wave.
HUNNAM: You saw me at my worst and my darkest, and maybe my most heroic.
MURPHY: [Laughs] Exactly, which we shan’t talk about. I believe I might’ve told you this before, but you were my first and only choice for the part. I felt very strongly that if you did not do it, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do it. Obviously I knew you were a great actor; however, I was not prepared for the level that you go to in this part. I think you’d agree that it’s the strongest and probably the most diffi cult performance of your career. I was absolutely shocked that you pretty much said yes in the pitch meeting, and I know it was because I was so passionate. I was singing for my supper. But I guess my question is, now that I’ve told you this, was there ever a moment after you signed on where you got terrified and realized, like, “Holy shit, this is almost a King Lear of parts?” It’s so huge and it follows him from his late teens to his early twenties to his death in his seventies.
HUNNAM: I got very afraid. After our initial conversation, which you alluded to, I was so seduced and thrilled by your passion for this character. I was going away to do another job, so I didn’t immediately jump into doing research on my own, and then it came time to start prepping for this. I think I read every book written on Ed Gein, and it started to be come impossibly bleak to me. I really wanted to challenge myself in my career at this point in life, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to play a type of character I’ve never played before. But the darkness of it really scared me. And finding the truth in who he was felt like it was going to force me to go to a place that I didn’t necessarily want to go.
Continue reading Press: Charlie Hunnam and Ryan Murphy on Finding the Man Inside the Monster
GQ.com — About six months ago, Charlie Hunnam had “a divinely architected” ayahuasca trip.
“I had a big death experience,” he says, his light blue eyes widening and shifting upward.
We’re sitting across from each other in his office, which sits in a row of mostly empty commercial spaces off a sleepy thoroughfare in North Hollywood. Charlie, blond and built, is dressed like an upmarket Jax Teller: simple white tee, selvedge denim, and black Converse. His hair is neatly slicked back, and a scruffy matching goatee frames his strong, leading-man jawline. He’s cautious to talk about the trip at first, worried I might think it was recreational. But once I tell him I’m familiar with the medicine, he begins to share his journey on what he calls “the astral plane.” I lean in a little bit closer.
It began, as Hunnam describes in hybrid Northern English–Angeleno drawl, with “a really traumatic feeling of holding on and holding on, and feeling a sense of unfinished business and panic.” That panic eventually gave way to a voice—his voice? The voice of God?—repeating the same phrase over and over again: Life is preparation for death. Life is preparation for death. Life is preparation for death. It was, Charlie says with awe, “like a lullaby easing me off of the precipice that I was on.”
He realized that he needed to take the voice’s mantra to heart, to “live purely, and love, and help the people that come into your path that are in need of help.”
The way he locks into the memory, I get the sense that this experience was steeped in a psychological muck as dark as the Nespresso pods he’d politely brewed for us that morning. After all, not long before he’d gone on that journey, the 45-year-old actor spent nearly nine months in a role where death was on the call sheet daily.
Hunnam stars as Ed Gein in the third season of Ryan Murphy’s Emmy-winning Netflix anthology series Monster. Gein was a soft-spoken Wisconsin farmer who earned the nickname “the Butcher of Plainfield” for crafting gruesome keepsakes from the body parts of people he murdered and others he exhumed from a local graveyard. Exposed for his crimes in 1957, he haunted—and titillated—a Rockwellian postwar America. Though Gein’s name has since faded from the collective imagination (or, at least, those who don’t listen to serial-killer podcasts), exaggerations of his crimes live on, refracted through the lenses of some of cinema’s most famous auteurs. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) all remixed Gein’s story, and, in the process, defined a new era in which the villain was not a fictional ghoul like Dracula but man himself. With the help of a stirring, fearless performance from Hunnam—which includes a full voice, body, and face transformation; dance numbers in satin lingerie; and a shocking necrophilia scene—Murphy chops and screws Gein’s life narrative again, retelling his story for the modern age of voyeurism, with all the punchy bombast we’ve come to expect in his extended true crime universe.
If early reactions are any indication, the Ed Gein story pushes the Monster franchise—which previously earned massive viewership for spotlighting Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers—into even more disturbing territory. Fans and reviewers have filmed their horrified responses to the season’s most grotesque scenes. “Do not eat while watching this show,” cautions one TikToker. “This is not an eat-while-I-watch.” And a clear consensus has emerged about Hunnam’s transformation, which many are calling phenomenal, even scary. Continue reading Press: Charlie Hunnam on His Dance With Death for the New Season of Monster
Charlie appeared at the ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Genre/SAG Nom Comm Screening on October 3rd in New York City. Following the screening at the Crosby Hotel, Charlie took the stage for a conversation with host Josh Horowitz. You can view photos from the event in the gallery now.
Charlie concluded his New York press circuit on September 30th by attending the premiere of ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story,’ where he walked the red carpet with his longtime partner, Morgana, and the rest of the cast and directors of the show. You can now browse over 200+ photos to the gallery from the event.
To wrap up his day of press in New York, Charlie dropped by Late Night with Seth Myers on September 30th to promote ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story,’. He discussed his role as Ed Gein and shared some–hilarious–stories about his experience from presenting at the Emmy Awards. High-quality photos and screen captures are now available in the gallery! If you missed it, you can also watch the full interview below.
Promoting his new series, ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story,’ Charlie was a guest on NBC’s The TODAY Show on September 30th, just days before the October 3rd Netflix premiere. High-quality photos and screen captures are now available in the gallery! If you missed it, you can also watch the full interview below.
On September 29th, Charlie attended the ‘The Ed Gein Story’ Tastemaker Dinner, hosted by Netflix and Evan Ross Katz. Charlie was in New York to promote the third season of the Monster series, ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story,’ which premieres on Netflix on October 3rd.
