‘Becoming a murderer for Netflix’s gruesome thriller was bleak – but I couldn’t judge him’

Charlie Hunnam probably wouldn’t be the first person you think of when you see a photo of the Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein.

His gruesome crimes – laid out in a sobering bulletproof list over on Wikipedia – inspired fictional killers like Norman Bates, Leatherface and now the latest entry into Ryan Murphy’s Monster series.

And while Hunnam might not be top of mind as an Ed Gein dead ringer, with the help of 30 pounds weight loss, make-up and a frighteningly blank dissociative gaze, it’s a performance that’s hard to fault. 

That by no means meant it came easy. The 45-year-old is upfront in telling Metro it seemed an ‘impossibly bleak’ undertaking, requiring more of him than is immediately apparent on the surface when you watch the eight episodes.

‘My responsibility was to get to know the character as well as I could,’ he tells us ahead of the show’s release. ‘I just read everything. I read all of the court transcripts, his medical records, every book that’s been written about Ed, so I could have my own understanding of who he was.’

Neither Hunnam nor the Netflix production were interested in the crimes Gein committed – he was charged with one murder, later confessed to another, and then there was the grave-robbing – so much as why he did what he did.

‘My job, frankly, is to not judge the character at all, but to try to empathise with them, to try to understand what was motivating him,’ he tells us. 

‘This is very much an exploration of mental illness and the consequence of abuse, the consequence of isolation and so those were the things that I was really focusing on understanding.’

While he admits that he was never going to find Gein relatable, he hopes viewers ‘might be able to understand, hopefully in a meaningful way, why we need to take mental illness and abuse very seriously and provide help for people.’

With two seasons to its name, the Monster anthology series has not yet been beyond reproach.

The Jeffrey Dahmer season was criticised for everything from not involving the victim’s families and glamorising its serial killer, to offering up a slog of a TV watch that did little to justify its own existence. The Menendez season was met more favourably, but added vaguely incestuous undertones to the brothers’ relationship for reasons that remain unclear.

Media outlets were not given screeners for the Ed Gein season before its release, but from our interview, it’s clear the impulse was there to offer more than a grim dramatisation of a man who exhumed corpses to fashion them into keepsakes.

Hunnam says the aim was to turn the nature versus nurture question of how these monsters came to be on viewers, questioning what part slavish true crime obsessives have to play in ‘darkening the global psyche’. 

Gein isn’t a name with the true crime infamy of Dahmer or Ted Bundy (who Murphy has said he’s not interested in dramatising), but the long tail of his crimes is found in cinema. 

The show dramatises how his case inspired culture, with Alfred Hitchcock even entering proceedings as a character. There would be no Psycho were it not for Gein and his perverse maternal relationship.

How implicated Monster itself is, in serving up ever-more outrageous depictions of human nature for hungry TV-watchers, is something we only graze.

‘One of the things that is so interesting about this franchise is that it’s always complicated,’ says Hunnam (as we, unfortunately, run out of time). 

‘Ryan [Murphy] does a really fearless and interesting thing within the show where he turns that lens on us too. 

‘We’re obviously exploring this character as honestly as we can, but we’re also perpetuating that cycle and asking the question of, “Why do we feel compelled to tell these stories? Why do people feel compelled to watch these stories?”’ 

He suggests it all comes back to an overarching, seemingly insatiable, appetite for storytelling as a means of making sense of ourselves and that complex old chestnut, ‘the human condition’.  

‘The last point I’ll make is,’ Hunnam begins (we are tremendously out of time by now), ‘I think that we all are deeply afraid, in our own personal way, of the Bogeyman.

‘There’s always our version of this terrible thing lurking in the shadows that we pray never happens. I think that horror is an opportunity to explore that and expose ourselves to it in a relatively safe way, maybe to understand the nature of our own fear.’

With Hunnam’s thinking, this season of Monster could turn out to be the most unlikely of all things: a comfort watch.

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