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

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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.’

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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.

Charlie Hunnam’s frighteningly blank gaze as Ed Gein (Picture: Netflix) Gein was the template for numerous horror classics (Picture: Netflix)

‘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.

Gein admitted to frequenting local graveyards to exhume recently buried bodies (Picture: Netflix)