In his interview with Netflix, Charlie Hunnam discussed the extreme dedication required to play Ed Gein in Monster: The Ed Gein Story. He shared details about his extensive research, the personal sacrifice involved in his significant weight loss (no cake on his birthday!), and the emotional toll the terrifying role took. He also explained the steps he took to finally shed the character after filming ended. It’s a great interview you don’t want to miss!
Charlie Hunnam sat down for a “High Five” segment with Man About Town to talk about his favorite things, and he got super personal about his influences and fears.
He named his favorite album, Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” and connected it all the way back to a pivotal summer when he was 16 and hanging out with his mates in Newcastle. He also shared some insight into his dedication to his craft, admitting that his terrifying experience on the Ed Gein story taught him that pursuing roles that seem “impossible” is where the biggest rewards are found. And so much more! You can check it out below:
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
Charlie Hunnam sat down for the WIRED Autocomplete Interview to answer the web’s most searched questions, offering details on his career and personal life. The interview opens with Charlie admitting to having put 65,000 miles on his motorcycle while filming Sons of Anarchy, but admitted he doesn’t ride as much as he use to due a fear he developed due to drivers in Los Angeles. Charlie also confirmed he studies Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu but hasn’t practiced as much as he would like due to the back injury he got while filming Rebel Moon. He admits he does in fact own a ranch, although he doesn’t live there because it’s undeveloped land with no house so he sleeps in the back of his pickup truck when visiting.
While discussing his writing ambitions, he noted that while he has penned several screenplays, including a film about Vlad the Impaler, none have been produced as yet. For his role as Ed Gein in the series Monster, he admitted he was initially intimidated but was more interested in working with Ryan Murphy to explore why Gein became a monster—the inspiration for films like Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—rather than what he did. He eventually goes on to share the story of how he got the role of Jax Teller, explaining he first read the Sons of Anarchy script because it was the thinnest in a pile of material he needed to review. He follows that up by listing the numerous items he stole from the Sons of Anarchy set, admitting he took everything “that wasn’t nailed down,” including his bike, his cut, the rings, and even a “red plastic dragon”.
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
This is your masterpost for all things ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story.’ Below you’ll find every video and interview of Charlie discussing his role as Ed Gein during his press tour while in New York. More videos will be added to the post as they’re published, so be sure to keep checking back!
Continue reading Video Masterpost: ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Press Tour
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
