Charlie Hunnam admits he was “terrified” to take on his latest role, and fans of “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” will understand why.
Charlie Hunnam Opens Up About Playing Ed Gein
Hunnam sat down with “Extra” to discuss season 3 of Ryan Murphy’s hit Netflix series “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” which explores the real-life crimes of Ed Gein — a convicted murderer, grave robber, and suspected serial killer whose actions inspired classics like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“I’ve never really been that interested in horror,” Hunnam admitted. “And on the surface, this wouldn’t seem like a character that I’d be interested in playing, frankly. But I really recognize the enormous challenge of it. And as I get older, I just want to do better and better work and I want to be really engaged by trying to do hard things in my life. And I thought this character seemed impossible for me to be able to play, and I was terrified and I thought, ‘Alright, well, that’s a pretty good place to start.’”
Hunnam explained that the most difficult part of the role wasn’t the physical transformation — it was understanding Gein’s psychology. “The most challenging part was understanding him and figuring out a way to make it a human being and not just a parody of evil,” he said.
Hunnam Explains His Approach to a Complex Character
The actor said he approached the role with the belief that storytelling should reflect “certain truths that are confusing about the human condition.”
“I do believe the storytelling has an important function that it reflects back to us certain truths that are confusing about the human condition and we can learn a little something about ourselves and, unfortunately, evil and darkness exists in the world,” Hunnam said. “And so, I wanted this to be an honest portrayal of how a human being can become a monster.”
To ground the character, he searched for “relatable elements” that would allow viewers to understand Gein before the more horrific moments of the series unfolded. “I looked for relatable elements of him that we can sort of demonstrate to the audience, so you can feel like, ‘I understand this person. I know this person.’ So then when we get into the stuff that’s not relatable at all it can be kind of shocking, but you can somehow understand how it happened in maybe like a cautionary-type of tale,” he explained.
Hunnam added, “This was about abuse that had never been healed, and it was about isolation and the consequence of that, and it was about mental health being untreated.”
“Monster: The Ed Gein Story” is streaming now on Netflix.
He did an amazing job as Ed Gein and gave me the chills. But it also made me look further into this guy’s horrific life. Again, mothers and/or fathers can mess up a child’s psyche forever but it makes you wonder if things would have been different if they were raised differently or was this type of behavior born in them.