Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are working to bring fans into the minds of some of the most infamous serial killers. The franchise Monster began with Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer and while season 2 took a departure, we are now back with the men who have been studied for years with Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein.
As part of the press for Monster: The Ed Gein Story, star Charlie Hunnam took part of a press junket to talk about the series and I was lucky enough have a question asked. I asked Hunnam about the tricky balance between playing up the monstrous elements of Gein and still creating a fully fleshed out character.
“Well, luckily, we had Ryan and Ian doing a spectacular job with the script, so a lot of the work was
already done for me,” Hunnam said. “But you know, there’s a responsibility. There is a bigger
responsibility when playing a historical character. And so, I wanted to do as much research as I could. I felt very distant to begin with. You know, I sort of felt like he was behind a wall of glass and I was looking in. And so, it was just a slow process of reading as much as I could and trying to understand him.”
Hunnam went on to talk about the medical records that are available of Gein. When caught, Gein plead insanity and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. “What was one of the really wonderful resources I found was all of his medical records, Hunnam said. “He had been in a hospital for the criminally insane for 30 years of his life and he did quarterly reviews. So, there were 30 years times four, so about a hundred and 20 different reports had been written about him, which was an amazing resource. But just trying to get to know him and trying to understand. I think the central question we were asking is why he did what he did. Not necessarily focusing on what he did, but trying to understand the man behind the monster.”
The entire season of Monster: The Ed Gein Story is now streaming on Netflix.
(featured image: Netflix)
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