It’s a huge responsibility to bring a version of a character to life who was a real person. Throw in the success of a franchise and an infamous serial killer and Charlie Hunnam knew he needed to get his portrayal of Ed Gein right.
“Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” the eight-part Netflix series, is led by Hunnam as the serial killer who murdered at least two women and exhumed several bodies for his heinous purposes in the 1950s. Raised by an evangelical mother whom he obsessed over, Gein desecrated human cadavers to make a skin suit. His story is rife with disturbing, unprecedented psychological drama and inspired “Psycho,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Hunnam knew very little about Gein, so when he signed on, he began in-depth research.
“It was initially pretty off-putting, because most of the books that have been published about him are these grotesque catalogs, sensationalizing the darker side of who he was and what he did,” says Hunnam, who was fundamentally interested in “understanding what went wrong in the human being that evolved into the monster.”
That is the essence behind the “Monster” franchise, created by Ryan Murphy. With “The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” “The Menendez Brothers” and now, with Ed Gein, the series explores true crime through a lens that begs the question: What made the monster, and who is complicit in that evolution?
