Forbes.com — Charlie Hunnam went all in while preparing to portray serial killer Ed Gein. He underwent a drastic physical transformation, shedding nearly 30 pounds in three weeks to match Gein’s malnourished-looking frame. Hunnam also listened to Gein’s high-pitched voice in a rare recording to perfect his vocal pattern and tone.

It was also pertinent to Hunnam to find a way to relate to Gein’s humanity despite the grotesque things he did. He discussed how he got into the mind of a serial killer for Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which premiered on Netflix on October 3.

In a Zoom interview the day of the premiere, Hunnam, who also served as an executive producer on the series, told me how important it was to find the human being inside of Gein and not solely focus on his monstrous behavior.

“There was an enormous amount of trepidation and fear initially,” Hunnam admitted. “And then it was just trying to understand him, trying not to judge him, trying to find the truth and find the man behind the monster.”

Gein’s story is the third installment in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology series, which includes the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer and Lyle and Erik Menendez. And this isn’t the first time that the uniquely gruesome nature of Gein’s crimes has inspired Hollywood to tell his tale, or create characters in his likeness.

A mixture of isolation, psychosis and an all-consuming obsession with his mother, with whom he had a toxic relationship, led to a string of murders so heinous that he became the blueprint for Hollywood horror. Gein has been the inspiration behind several classic films and fictional characters, including Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Continue reading Press: Charlie Hunnam On What He Needed To Portray Ed Gein In Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monster’

People.com — While Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story may delve into some deeply dark territory, the atmosphere on set was surprisingly “joyous,” according to Charlie Hunnam, who plays the show’s titular character.

Hunnam spoke to PEOPLE exclusively during the show’s premiere at The Plaza Hotel in New York City on Sept. 30. During the conversation, the actor shared that he and his castmates found immense fulfillment in putting in the work each day and getting to perfect their “craft.”

“So there’s the subject matter and then there’s [the] actual process,” Hunnam, 45, explains. “And we all felt really good about the work we were doing. And so actually in terms of the experience we had of trying to make this show every day — just the actual putting our craft into effect — it was actually really joyous and light.”

He adds, “We were proud of ourselves and we were reaching for something. And not every day, but more often than not, managing to grab a hold of it. So it was really actually — I don’t want to say a fun experience […] but it was very satisfying and a beautiful experience.”

Hunnam also said that “finding the truth” of the character was “the whole process.”

“We were much more interested in why Ed did what he did, rather than exploring what he did. Everybody sort of knows what he did, and it’s been chronicled in many films that he inspired and then direct adaptation to his life. And so that was clearly the mission right from the beginning,” he says.

Hunnam continues, “And we, I think, felt confident that if we remain true to that, of just trying to find the truth in reflecting back this bizarre, tiny, dark corner of the human condition that he manifested that […] we were staying true to the traditions of storytelling — which is to try to help us understand ourselves because we’re all so bizarre, even the most normal of us.”

Gein’s crimes shocked and horrified the nation upon his arrest in 1957. A police search of his Wisconsin farm revealed a woman’s decapitated body in his shed and the head of another woman in his bedroom. Investigators also discovered human remains and organs in the home, many of which were collected from corpses exhumed from local graves. He also had clothing, furniture, a lampshade and masks made of human skin.

He subsequently served as the partial inspiration for a number of serial killers in pop culture, including Norman Bates in Psycho, Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs and Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story, marks the third installment of the Ryan Murphy-created anthology series. The previous two seasons explored the lives and dark legacies of Jeffrey Dahmer and Lyle and Erik Menendez.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is available to stream on Netflix.

HollywoodReporter.com — It’s fall, so that means another season of Monster from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s anthology series is upon us, and this time, the horror series follows the life of the infamous serial killer of the 1950s, Ed Gein, who inspired classic horror films Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.

For the show to land, everything falls on the performance of its title character, played by Charlie Hunnam. To step into the world of Ed, and try to understand him, the Sons of Anarchy star spent months researching the murderer to do his role justice and “not glamorize” the horrific things Ed is known for, such as murdering women, wearing their faces and digging up graves.

“I read every single book that had been written about him, and there was a lot of books. I read all of the court transcriptions, all of his medical records. And then I read the scripts over and over to understand what would drive a human being to do some of the pretty wild things he did — pretty despicable acts,” Hunnam told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this week at the series’ New York City premiere. “We were really very serious about trying to understand the man and not just sensationalize this, and certainly not glamorize it at all.”

While preparing for the role, he said he didn’t seek out advice from Evan Peters, who starred as Jeffrey Dahmer in the first season of Monster, because they had never crossed paths. Instead, he found help from another American Horror Story veteran.

“I’ve never met Evan Peters. I’m an enormous fan of his work. I would love to get to meet him, but I never had an opportunity to. I did bump into Sarah Paulson, who’s worked with Ryan Murphy a lot and tackled some pretty dark characters and she’s an old friend of mine from way back in the day,” Hunnam said. “So I asked her advice about navigating it and she was really kind and basically said, ‘Challenge yourself. Don’t be afraid. It’s inside you, just look deep and find it.’”

The series kicks off with viewers seeing Ed kill his brother Henry (Hudson Oz), but not realizing it until later because of his undiagnosed schizophrenia, where he imagines he’s talking to his brother — after he just murdered him. Once his mother, Augusta (Laurie Metcalf) finds out her son is dead, she has a stroke and later dies. All of this leads to becoming secluded in Plainfield, Wisconsin, where the murders ramp up. As Hunnam describes, “It’s really about mental health and the consequences of abuse and isolation.”

His dedication to portraying Ed was praised by co-star Suzanna Son, who plays Ed’s love interest in the show, the very morbidly curious Adeline Watkins. “What a gift to work alongside Charlie. He was in character, I would say 80 percent of the time, and that made my job all the easier because he’s building the world for me to live in,” she said.
Continue reading Press: Charlie Hunnam Unmasks His Transformation Into Ed Gein for ‘Monster,’ Reveals Sarah Paulson’s Advice

Variety.com — In “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” you see the titular serial killer long before you hear him. Silently, Ed Gein — whose on-screen avatars have haunted American pop culture since his pattern of murder and grave-robbing became public in 1957 — does chores on the family farm. Then he peeps on a neighbor before pleasuring himself while wearing his mother’s undergarments. Ryan Murphy’s “Monster” franchise provocations have rarely begun quite so startlingly. It’s only after Mom catches him in the act that he finally speaks. “S’pose I was trying to be funny,” he says in a voice that’s ethereal, a bit flutelike — Elmer Fudd with half a hit of helium. Gein’s body, nude, is that of a frighteningly well-developed man; his voice is that of a child.

“The voice needed to be really specific,” Hunnam tells me in August, far from the Illinois set of “Monster,” and speaking once again in his Northern English accent. “But I don’t think any of us really had an idea of what that was.” Gein existed before the media age; recordings of him were rare. But they did exist.

“Our best researchers couldn’t get” the tape, says Max Winkler, the director of six of the season’s eight episodes. “But Charlie got it, because he’s Charlie and he does crazy shit.” For Gein’s voice, Winkler imagined a combination of Mark Rylance’s reedy tone in his Tony-winning role in “Jerusalem” and Michael Jackson. Late in his preparation process, Hunnam asked Joshua Kunau, producer of the documentary “Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein,” to share the audio of a 70-minute interview with Gein that had not been legally admissible. The tape had been recorded the night he was arrested, and Hunnam used it to help inform the voice he’d been preparing. “I started to see him through a series of affectations to please his mother,” Hunnam says. “That’s where the voice came from.” The result is the year’s most daring TV performance, rooted in a painful, just barely recognizable humanity.

Hunnam’s creation will be, for many viewers, an introduction to Ed Gein. The rural Wisconsinite, who died in a psychiatric institution in 1984, became known for keeping as totems pieces of his victims’ bodies, in a string of crimes that shocked bucolic 1950s America. His case inspired “Psycho” (published as a novel two years after Gein’s 1957 arrest, then made into Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 film), then “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” — and later, characters in “The Silence of the Lambs” and Murphy’s own “American Horror Story: Asylum.” This new season will cover not merely Gein’s crimes but the ways in which the culture digested and refracted them: Hitchcock, for instance, enters the story as a character.

“Monster” was Ryan Murphy’s most successful creation during his Netflix era, and it lives on now that his overall deal is at Disney; the first two seasons, in 2022 and 2024, covered Jeffrey Dahmer and Erik and Lyle Menendez, and catalyzed massive viewership with an empathy-for-the-devil approach and a grisly appeal to the basic human fascination with true crime. (The Dahmer season of “Monster,” Netflix says, drew some 115.6 million viewers in its first 91 days, hitting No. 1 on the streamer’s charts in 82 countries.)

But because so much less is known about what made Gein tick than the motivations of Dahmer and the Menendezes, Hunnam had room to maneuver and to invent. And that suited him fine. When he said yes to playing Gein, it ended a self-imposed dry spell; since 2020, he had barely acted, aside from starring in the one-season Apple TV+ series “Shantaram” and appearing in the first part of Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon” film series, during which, Hunnam says, he suffered “a pretty significant back injury that slowed me down.” Instead, he’s been writing and selling as-yet-unproduced pilots — including to FX, the network that brought him to stateside fame with his lead role on “Sons of Anarchy.”

Now, at 45, he’s at the center of an Emmy-winning franchise under the supervision of one of the most powerful TV producers on the planet. Hunnam’s communion with Gein is far greater than the sum of its parts — an actor-subject duet that generates tension, fear and melancholy too. This is risky, delicate character work at the heart of TV’s most scrutinized show, and millions of “Monster” fans will judge for themselves on Oct. 3 how well the pairing works.

Despite all that’s at stake, the project came together impulsively. Hunnam signed on to “Monster” in the middle of his first conversation with Murphy. Murphy showed up 15 minutes late to what had been planned as a general meeting at the Chateau Marmont, and apologetically explained that he’d been caught up in writing about the killer. The conversation unspooled from there. “I didn’t think he’d be jaded,” says Hunnam, “but his childlike enthusiasm for storytelling shone through. He just was fucking stoked.”

Laurie Metcalf already knew Murphy when he approached her to play Gein’s mother; she’d been cast as Wallis Simpson, the American socialite whose love led King Edward VIII to abdicate the throne, in a Murphy project that never got made. As was the case with Hunnam, she hadn’t seen a script either. “The way Ryan talked about it was fascinating and compelling,” she says, “but for an actor to not see even a sentence of the script — you have to take a leap of faith.”

And Hunnam was ready to jump. After speaking for two hours, “Ryan turns around and says, ‘If you want to play him..”

That was a Friday; Netflix’s business affairs department had an offer to Hunnam by Sunday, which he accepted.

When we first meet, Hunnam tells me that he’s “oddly nervous” to be interviewed; there hasn’t been reason for him to be profiled in years. Though he’s physically imposing, his body language is somewhat coiled, as if he’s preemptively defending himself. The two of us sit down at the North Hollywood coffee shop where he’s a regular — when I walk in, he’s showing the baristas new pictures of his four cats. But, with Hunnam feeling self-conscious about discussing his work in front of folks he sees daily, we relocate down the block to the office where he writes, with a low-slung couch and an acoustic guitar in the corner. He apologizes for the smell — he smoked a cigar this morning. Continue reading Press: How Charlie Hunnam Became the Serial Killer From Hell: Inside the Voice Recordings, Psychotic Breakdowns and Terrifying Murders in Ryan Murphy’s New ‘Monster’

Ed Gein inspired fictional killers like Norman Bates and Leatherface. In Ryan Murphy’s latest series, Charlie Hunnam seeks the man behind the dead-skin mask.

NYTimes.com — When the writer and producer Ryan Murphy was 8, his parents left him to babysit his little brother. (This was the 1970s; these things happened.) Proudly in charge of the family television and TV Guide, Murphy chose a movie to watch.

That movie was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” No 8-year-old, alone at night, should watch that shower scene.

“I went berserk,” Murphy, 59, recalled in a recent group video call. “I screamed and cried, and I had to call my grandmother to come and help me.” A few days later he went to the library. An encyclopedia confirmed that while “Psycho,” based on a novel by Robert Bloch, was a work of fiction, it had a basis in fact: the gruesome crimes of a Wisconsin man named Ed Gein.

Some of us repress our primal wounds. Others, like Murphy, create a limited series about them. “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” the third installment of Murphy’s “Monster” franchise, premieres on Netflix on Friday. Cocreated and written by Ian Brennan, this season trains a dark lens on Gein, who is played by Charlie Hunnam, a charismatic English actor best known for starring as the muscular leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang on FX’s “Sons of Anarchy.”

The subject scared even Hunnam, a man who wouldn’t seem to scare easy. There were a few weeks, he said in the video call with Murphy and Brennan, “where I felt like maybe I’d actually made a mistake, that this was going to be too bleak and too difficult.”

A killer of outsize infamy, Gein is definitively responsible for only two deaths. (He was charged with a single killing and later confessed to one more.) But Gein also had a practice of disinterring the recently deceased and making masks, clothing and household items from their skin and bones, a gruesome ritual that kindled the interest of writers and filmmakers.

In addition to “Psycho,” his crimes inspired the character Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.” He has also been the subject of documentaries, true crime books, horror comics and more.

It makes sense that prestige television would eventually come for Gein. Viewers have a seemingly insatiable appetite for stories, true and false, centered on the more outrageous aspects of human nature — an appetite that Murphy, with his “American Horror Story,” “American Crime Story” and “Monster” franchises, has made a late career of whetting. Shortly after this season of “Monster” debuts, “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” will air on Peacock; “Murdaugh: Death in the Family,” based on the South Carolina lawyer turned convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh, will come to Hulu; and Netflix will host the Italian series “The Monster of Florence,” about an Italian serial killer active from the 1960s-80s.

That’s only October. The list, and the murders, goes on.

But hasn’t Gein already had his turn in the spotlight? Not exactly. “Monster,” however grisly, attempts to locate the man behind the movie monsters, the face beneath the skin masks.

“There are ugly things here, but they were all done by a man — by all accounts, a really strange, interesting man,” Brennan said.

Gein is in his way an American original, a homegrown boogeyman. Harold Schechter, the writer of the graphic novel “Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?” as well as “Deviant,” a comprehensive true-crime account of Gein’s life, considers Gein the first all-American monster.

“Gein was responsible for creating this distinctly American kind of horror,” Schechter said. He was a man of the Midwest, a farmer. He babysat local children. He played the accordion.

The unanswerable question at the dark heart of any season of “Monster” is whether a so-called monster is born or made. With Gein there is good evidence on both sides. Raised by a fervently religious mother who attempted to isolate her sons, he also had schizophrenia. But children of abusive parents rarely become murderers, and the vast majority of schizophrenics never engage in violence.

Murphy and Brennan have their own theories about why Gein desecrated corpses, some of them related to Gein’s exposure, through pulp magazines and adventure comics, to images of Nazi atrocities in World War II. But these are of course just theories. (And an opportunity for some lurid scenes starring the actress Vicky Krieps as the war criminal Ilse Koch, who was accused of commissioning household objects made out of the skin of prisoners.)

The show also dramatizes how Gein’s story was adopted by filmmakers like Hitchcock (played by Tom Hollander, beneath heavy prosthetics) and Tobe Hooper (Will Brill), the director of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” who have theories of their own. In an early scene, Hitchcock argues that sexual repression corrupted Gein.

“Polite society burdens us with the fiction that these urges do not exist,” Hollander’s Hitchcock says in an early episode of “Monster.” “That transforms these urges into secrets we must hide. These secrets make us sick.” Continue reading Press: This Season of ‘Monster’ Digs Up an All-American Nightmare