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!
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
Netflix.com — Production is underway in Los Angeles on Season 4 of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster. The new season will center on Lizzie Borden, the infamous Massachusetts woman who was accused of the 1892 murder of her parents.
After an extensive search, the fourth installment of Murphy’s hit anthology series will star Ella Beatty. Above, you can see a photo of Beatty accepting the Monster torch from her predecessor Charlie Hunnam, who played Ed Gein in the most recent season of the anthology series and will return to the franchise as Andrew Borden in Season 4.
Beatty previously appeared in Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans; she can also be seen in Mary Bronstein’s Sundance sensation If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Also joining the fourth season of Monster are Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Monster: The Ed Gein Story) as the Bordens’ live-in maid, Bridget Sullivan, and Rebecca Hall (Christine, Passing) as Lizzie’s stepmother, Abby Borden. Billie Lourd (American Horror Story, The Last Showgirl) will play Lizzie’s older sister Emma, while Jessica Barden (The End of the F***ing World, Dune: Prophecy) will play Lizzie’s actress friend Nance O’Neill.
Max Winkler (Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Grotesquerie) will direct the first episode of Monster Season 4.
The first two installments of Monster have received a combined 24 Emmy nominations. DAHMER — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story focused on Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters) and became one of the most highly watched series in Netflix history, reaching one billion view hours in its first 60 days. It currently ranks #4 on the all-time English TV Top 10.
The second installment, Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story, centered around the case of the real-life brothers (played by Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, respectively) who were convicted in 1996 for the murders of their parents. It received 11 nominations at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2025.
The third installment, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, followed the story of Ed Gein, the “Plainfield Ghoul” whose story inspired Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and more. The series hit Netflix’s Top 10 with 12.2 million views globally in its first three days and reached #1 in 11 countries.
Stay tuned for more information about the fourth season of Monster as production ramps up.
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.
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’
