Charlie Hunnam hopes that after viewers watch Monster: The Ed Gein Story, they’re left questioning who the real monsters are.
Hunnam, who plays Gein, defended the series ahead of the Oct. 3 release of the new season in the Netflix true-crime horror anthology, given that the previous two editions — The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story — both received criticism for being sensational portrayals.
“If people are compelled to talk about it and think about it, hopefully they’ll actually be compelled to watch the show,” he told The Hollywood Reporter when asked what he hopes conversations would be about Ed Gein. “What I would hope and feel really confident in is that it was a very sincere exploration of the human condition and why this boy did what he did.”
Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, The Ed Gein Story picks up in 1950s rural Wisconsin, and follows the titular monster — known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul — and tells the tale of his perverse crimes, which would go on to inspire the onscreen horrors seen in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.
Of the episodes, Hunnam said, “I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could.”
And, he hopes that means viewers are left looking inward after watching. “Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and…that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?” he told the outlet. “Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?”
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Hunnam previously admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he doesn’t “really like the horror genre” or “impossibly dark, bleak stories,” and so the role was always “kind of a strange choice” for him. So much so that he was “truly gobsmacked” when Murphy asked him to play Gein during a two-hour dinner conversation.
“I just found myself saying yes,” Hunnam said. “Based, I would say like 99 percent of it, on just how much I liked Ryan.”
And, now that it’s all said and done (all eight episodes are now streaming on Netflix), Hunnam said that the process of playing Ed Gein taught him something about himself.
“I think I learned the truth of like, that which you most need to find is where you least wish to look — you know, the greater the challenge, the greater the reward,” he says.
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