In “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” you see the titular serial killer long before you hear him. Silently, Ed Gein — whose on-screen avatars have haunted American pop culture since his pattern of murder and grave-robbing became public in 1957 — does chores on the family farm. Then he peeps on a neighbor before pleasuring himself while wearing his mother’s undergarments. Ryan Murphy’s “Monster” franchise provocations have rarely begun quite so startlingly. It’s only after Mom catches him in the act that he finally speaks. “S’pose I was trying to be funny,” he says in a voice that’s ethereal, a bit flutelike — Elmer Fudd with half a hit of helium. Gein’s body, nude, is that of a frighteningly well-developed man; his voice is that of a child.
“The voice needed to be really specific,” Hunnam tells me in August, far from the Illinois set of “Monster,” and speaking once again in his Northern English accent. “But I don’t think any of us really had an idea of what that was.” Gein existed before the media age; recordings of him were rare. But they did exist.
“Our best researchers couldn’t get” the tape, says Max Winkler, the director of six of the season’s eight episodes. “But Charlie got it, because he’s Charlie and he does crazy shit.” For Gein’s voice, Winkler imagined a combination of Mark Rylance’s reedy tone in his Tony-winning role in “Jerusalem” and Michael Jackson. Late in his preparation process, Hunnam asked Joshua Kunau, producer of the documentary “Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein,” to share the audio of a 70-minute interview with Gein that had not been legally admissible. The tape had been recorded the night he was arrested, and Hunnam used it to help inform the voice he’d been preparing. “I started to see him through a series of affectations to please his mother,” Hunnam says. “That’s where the voice came from.” The result is the year’s most daring TV performance, rooted in a painful, just barely recognizable humanity.
Hunnam’s creation will be, for many viewers, an introduction to Ed Gein. The rural Wisconsinite, who died in a psychiatric institution in 1984, became known for keeping as totems pieces of his victims’ bodies, in a string of crimes that shocked bucolic 1950s America. His case inspired “Psycho” (published as a novel two years after Gein’s 1957 arrest, then made into Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 film), then “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” — and later, characters in “The Silence of the Lambs” and Murphy’s own “American Horror Story: Asylum.” This new season will cover not merely Gein’s crimes but the ways in which the culture digested and refracted them: Hitchcock, for instance, enters the story as a character.
“Monster” was Ryan Murphy’s most successful creation during his Netflix era, and it lives on now that his overall deal is at Disney; the first two seasons, in 2022 and 2024, covered Jeffrey Dahmer and Erik and Lyle Menendez, and catalyzed massive viewership with an empathy-for-the-devil approach and a grisly appeal to the basic human fascination with true crime. (The Dahmer season of “Monster,” Netflix says, drew some 115.6 million viewers in its first 91 days, hitting No. 1 on the streamer’s charts in 82 countries.)
But because so much less is known about what made Gein tick than the motivations of Dahmer and the Menendezes, Hunnam had room to maneuver and to invent. And that suited him fine. When he said yes to playing Gein, it ended a self-imposed dry spell; since 2020, he had barely acted, aside from starring in the one-season Apple TV+ series “Shantaram” and appearing in the first part of Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon” film series, during which, Hunnam says, he suffered “a pretty significant back injury that slowed me down.” Instead, he’s been writing and selling as-yet-unproduced pilots — including to FX, the network that brought him to stateside fame with his lead role on “Sons of Anarchy.”
Now, at 45, he’s at the center of an Emmy-winning franchise under the supervision of one of the most powerful TV producers on the planet. Hunnam’s communion with Gein is far greater than the sum of its parts — an actor-subject duet that generates tension, fear and melancholy too. This is risky, delicate character work at the heart of TV’s most scrutinized show, and millions of “Monster” fans will judge for themselves on Oct. 3 how well the pairing works.
Despite all that’s at stake, the project came together impulsively. Hunnam signed on to “Monster” in the middle of his first conversation with Murphy. Murphy showed up 15 minutes late to what had been planned as a general meeting at the Chateau Marmont, and apologetically explained that he’d been caught up in writing about the killer. The conversation unspooled from there. “I didn’t think he’d be jaded,” says Hunnam, “but his childlike enthusiasm for storytelling shone through. He just was fucking stoked.”
Laurie Metcalf already knew Murphy when he approached her to play Gein’s mother; she’d been cast as Wallis Simpson, the American socialite whose love led King Edward VIII to abdicate the throne, in a Murphy project that never got made. As was the case with Hunnam, she hadn’t seen a script either. “The way Ryan talked about it was fascinating and compelling,” she says, “but for an actor to not see even a sentence of the script — you have to take a leap of faith.”
And Hunnam was ready to jump. After speaking for two hours, “Ryan turns around and says, ‘If you want to play him …’”
That was a Friday; Netflix’s business affairs department had an offer to Hunnam by Sunday, which he accepted.
When we first meet, Hunnam tells me that he’s “oddly nervous” to be interviewed; there hasn’t been reason for him to be profiled in years. Though he’s physically imposing, his body language is somewhat coiled, as if he’s preemptively defending himself. The two of us sit down at the North Hollywood coffee shop where he’s a regular — when I walk in, he’s showing the baristas new pictures of his four cats. But, with Hunnam feeling self-conscious about discussing his work in front of folks he sees daily, we relocate down the block to the office where he writes, with a low-slung couch and an acoustic guitar in the corner. He apologizes for the smell — he smoked a cigar this morning.
Writing daily has kept Hunnam grounded through a nomadic period, during which he bought, renovated and sold four homes in four years. “I scratched that itch until it bled,” he says, and he’s sworn off flipping for now. But the cadence came naturally to him, since his mother moved their family around Newcastle yearly when he was growing up.
Ryan Pfluger for Variety
Though his real-estate-loving mom “harbored this dream of being a movie star,” Hunnam says, and his grandmother painted each new mayor of Newcastle’s official portrait, his family didn’t expect him to go into the arts. His father assumed that Hunnam would eventually run his thriving business.
“My dad was an incredibly tough scrap-metal merchant in a brutal industry,” Hunnam says. “He was sort of a king in our city. He wanted me to take over his business, and I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to survive in that world.” He describes knowing that he’d disappointed his father as “not a regret, but a wound I had to carry.” “Sons of Anarchy,” a show deeply concerned with the relationships between children and parents, was a way to heal.
But “Sons of Anarchy,” which ran from 2008 to 2014, came after years of incremental TV work. Hunnam’s breakout in the U.K., in 1999 at age 18, was “Queer as Folk,” in which he played a 15-year-old exploring Manchester’s gay scene. The series, later remade for U.S. audiences, was groundbreaking, coming at a moment when depicting gay life (and gay sex) on TV was still taboo. And the role came with some unwelcome notoriety: Hunnam, who is straight, was hassled on the street, and at a train station in the northern English city of Preston, he “got into an altercation with a guy that looked like it was going to escalate into violence.” As for his father, “he didn’t quite get it — he asked if I was gay and if this was representative of the life I was living” — but the scrap-metal king eventually came around.
Within a week of the debut of “Queer as Folk,” Hunnam was in Los Angeles auditioning. He was on a tight budget, riding a BMX bike to auditions; after his 90-day visa expired, he returned to the U.K., went back to work at an Italian restaurant and saved up to cross the Atlantic again. He eventually booked an arc on the short-lived “Dawson’s Creek” spinoff “Young Americans” on The WB, earning more per episode than he’d gotten for all of “Queer as Folk,” and then the also short-lived Judd Apatow college comedy “Undeclared.”
If his rise to fame back home had been rapid — though ill-compensated enough that he was slinging plates of fettuccine again after “Queer as Folk” aired — the U.S. proved frustrating to crack. During Hunnam’s “Undeclared” audition, for instance, a thief stripped the handlebars and wheels off his bike. He went on to play the lead in the sprawling 2002 Dickens adaptation “Nicholas Nickleby,” and smaller roles in major productions like “Cold Mountain” and “Children of Men.”
Then came “Sons of Anarchy.” Hunnam played Jax Teller, who must carry on his late father’s legacy as leader of an outlaw motorcycle club. “I would look back at those early episodes and think I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I didn’t have a very developed skill set,” Hunnam says. “I feel really proud of Seasons 6 and 7, as though my work had finally caught up to the level of my aspiration.” In the later seasons, Jax descended into something like madness as he doled out violence and revenge; it was, perhaps, an early example of Hunnam keeping his eye on the man within the monster.
As “Sons” came in for a landing in 2014 — with Jax dying in the finale — Hunnam found a balance between commercial and passion projects. He upset this balance only occasionally, and with some consternation. Guillermo del Toro’s action flick “Pacific Rim,” for instance, is lodged uncomfortably in memory. “I thought it was a great opportunity to work with a director that I really like,” Hunnam says. “I couldn’t care less about giant robots fighting giant monsters. I read the script, and I had no emotional experience with it at all.”
Before that, Hunnam never made a film he wouldn’t rush to see in theaters, but he felt he owed his team. “That was one of the only times I broke the rule.” Two months after the 2013 release of “Pacific Rim,” Hunnam was announced as the male lead of “Fifty Shades of Grey” — only to drop out later that year. “I never looked back,” he says, breaking into laughter. He saw his almost co-star Dakota Johnson socially recently, “and she gave me a bit of a hard time about it in a very fun way.” He’s never seen the films. “I just wasn’t thinking clearly,” he says about taking the job in the first place. “No regrets at all.”
He’s similarly disinclined to second-guess his decision to walk away from acting for a time; he lights up telling me about working on the bible for his FX script. But he needed to come back to performing, and to find something that scared him. He’s not good at sitting idle: “Things do get a bit spooky when I’m not working.”
For his part, Murphy has been chasing Gein for some time. When he was 8, his parents left him to babysit his 3-year-old brother, and Murphy caught “Psycho” on TV. “I called my grandmother, and she had to come over,” Murphy says. “I was inconsolable.” After looking up the film in the encyclopedia, Murphy learned about the real-life figure who inspired Norman Bates’ crimes.
Ryan Pfluger for Variety
“I wanted to talk about that topic, about how every generation creates their own bogeyman,” Murphy says. “Every generation has to up the stakes of violence, because you become inured to it.” With the Gein season of “Monster,” Murphy flips the lens back on the audience, examining Gein’s media consumption, and our own.
After all, even if we don’t know who actually inspired them, we thrill to Norman Bates, Leatherface and Buffalo Bill; these creations stir something within us. As Ian Brennan, the show’s co-creator, says of Gein: “His story was bent and twisted, like a Silly Putty image. And the most interesting layer was turning the camera on ourselves — on Ryan and I, and on the audience. Oh, look, we’re doing the same thing. We’re obsessed with this guy.”
A terrifying story is enough to bring an audience in, but it takes a performer willing to go deep to keep the binge going. The first two seasons, anchored by Evan Peters (as Dahmer) and Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (as the Menendez brothers), were in-depth character studies; Peters won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Emmy, while Koch was nominated for both prizes. The Menendez season’s prismatic presentation of the abuse the brothers suffered generated calls for the real-life Erik and Lyle to be freed. “I do wish they had been paroled,” says Murphy about the recent decision by a California parole board that both brothers are to stay in prison, “and when I started working on it, I thought the complete opposite.”
The show, so far, has emphasized a clear-eyed approach to its subjects’ misdeeds, but also curiosity about untangling their psyches. Which meant that Hunnam had a big task ahead of him: walking the tightrope of making Gein something more than just a psychopath, without landing in a place of kitsch. Hunnam procrastinated out of fear, taking another job before beginning the process of discovering Gein. “I was about two months out,” he says. “I held it off as long as possible. So I started to read — and then I really got frightened.” There is a relative lack of sober reporting about Gein; Hunnam describes the books he was able to find as “a celebration of the grotesque, a celebration of the depraved.”
This wasn’t going to be Hunnam’s way in. A certain amount of grounding in the facts of the case was needed, sure — in his office, there’s a whiteboard with a timeline of the known events of Gein’s life. But he needed to locate the emotional truth too. “You have to have an enormous amount of love and empathy for a character that you play to be able to inhabit them,” he says. “Because as despicable as Ed was in his acts, I wanted to find the human in there.”
The series begins before Gein has ever killed, in 1945, as dawning awareness of death camps in Europe fills the air with sadism and conspiracy thinking. In Möbius strip fashion, Gein grows obsessed with crime — and the toxic blooming of his obsession into murder goes on to enthrall the world. We see Gein, stunted by a restrictive and abusive childhood, fantasizing about the dominatrix-esque concentration camp commandant known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald.”
As played by Vicky Krieps, this Nazi’s extended cameo in the first episode has the banality-of-evil overtones of “The Zone of Interest” but with the leering oddity of a Baz Luhrmann film; it’s another huge swing. “My family died in the camps. It was extremely important to me to get that right,” says Winkler. “They’re monsters because of what they did — some of them were really glamorous and looked like Vicky Krieps, and also turned Jews into lamps. That’s what a monster can look like.”
Ryan Pfluger for Variety
A monster can indeed be glamorous, but “Monster” has been at times accused of applying a little too much Hollywood glitz on its subjects: Enlisting famous hunks to play murderers can seem, to some viewers, exploitative. “There’s a distinction,” Brennan says. “We’re, if not humanizing, Homo sapiens-izing. What’s interesting is showing that these are human beings without trying to humanize them or make them sympathetic.” The success of the show has left him with mixed feelings. “The thing that always blows me away is that a billion people watch it. I was very squeamish about it at first. And then I was like, no, no, no — this is actually quite important work.”
That important work comes with high standards as to what stories are worth telling: In brainstorming potential subjects, Brennan and Murphy have definitively ruled some out. (Ted Bundy sparks nothing in Murphy: “When you look at those crimes,” he says, “what are the themes there? It doesn’t ask you any questions about society.”)
Other stories just aren’t ready yet. “We have a ‘maybe one day’ file,” Murphy says, noting that he considered a “Monster” season about Luigi Mangione but deemed it too early to proceed. “We know nothing about him,” he says.
This season, the work involves imaginative leaps: Gein died with a planned documentary about his life made by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog never completed. And Gein’s testimonies can’t be believed: “He’s an unreliable narrator about his own life,” Brennan says. This void gave both writers and actor room to find the man within the killer.
Hunnam is ambivalent about horror as a genre. “I personally don’t like to be forced to confront the most bleak and sinister elements of the human condition,” he says. His way through was by finding connection with a character whose deeds seem incomprehensible. “I could certainly see the accusation being leveled at me that I was too sensitive toward him, and let him off the hook a bit too much,” Hunnam says. “My hope was, although I clearly don’t understand the function of these type of stories, I understand that people are very drawn to them. I needed to bring Gein to life in as honest and human a way as possible.”
Hunnam sounds almost wistful as he describes an early inspiration for the character: Years ago, he visited the traveling exhibition “Bodies” and looked at preserved cadavers with the skin stripped away. He was repulsed then, but years later, thinking about a man who’d expressed an interest in the human body in the most macabre possible way sparked something in Hunnam. “When he was arrested, there was a copy of ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ in his house,” he says. “There was an interest in what’s happening below the surface.”
Which is an actor’s interest as well.
“I’ve worked with other actors who are different from this, but he wanted to be afraid,” Murphy says. “He wanted to show up every day with this enormous fear, like: Can I do this?” He describes for me the season’s penultimate episode, titled “Ham Radio,” in which Gein sits with a psychiatrist who tells him that he is not in fact a monster: He’s mentally ill.
“This one scene in particular was a really, really difficult scene that he had been dreading,” Murphy says. “And he did it in one take, and it’s the one that’s in the show.”
Hunnam is one for intense preparation. For the 2016 adventure epic “The Lost City of Z,” “all I took was a script and a change of clothes. I didn’t talk to my partner or my mom for 14 weeks.” A year later, for the 2017 remake of prison drama “Papillon,” he lost 35 pounds and spent a week in solitary confinement without food or water.
So it wasn’t hard to wonder whether Ed Gein haunted him at night during a six-month shoot in the Chicago winter.
“I didn’t feel the need to carry the weight of him home,” Hunnam says. The work was grueling and sometimes absurd — he describes learning dance routines and how to play the accordion — but the production’s relentlessness, he says, didn’t leave room for self-pity. “It didn’t end up feeling that dark most of the time. I went through so much darkness and fear initially that it ended up feeling safe and joyous.” Hunnam did keep Gein’s distinctive voice throughout filming, but even this he shrugs off: “I wasn’t acutely aware of it being annoying to people. And I didn’t stay in it in a way that was a labor. I was just having fun — I shouldn’t say having fun. I was enjoying the process.”
I later mention to Winkler — who had suggested Hunnam for the series after working with him on the boxing drama “Jungleland” — that Hunnam seemed not to have been too tortured by the process. “He’s lying!” Winkler blurts out. “He starved himself for six months. He was very hungry.” He describes Hunnam’s obsessive drive to keep weight off, even in temperatures on outdoor shoot days that froze crew members’ coffee. Hunnam was clearly suffering, but he wouldn’t complain. “He is devoid of pretension,” Winkler says. “Which is what I love about him. Charlie is the son of a scrap-metal worker from Newcastle. Charlie does his own taxes.”
What lies ahead for Hunnam may include more “Monster”: Asked about reporting that he will play the father of Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty) in the fourth season of “Monster,” Hunnam’s eyes twinkle as he declines comment. Later, once the news is out, Murphy tells me that the role is complex, and that the season will probe the history of infamous women, including Aileen Wuornos and Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory.
No surprise, then, that he’d welcome a return to Murphy’s universe: Something strange happened on the “Monster” set, for all the cold and physical exertion. “Can you say ‘fun’ about something like that?” Metcalf muses. “But it really was. Everyone was open to inspiration and playing and inventing.”
Ryan Pfluger for Variety
Hunnam tends to throw himself into work; his “Lost City of Z” abandonment of his loved ones may have been extreme, but Hunnam doesn’t take any job lightly. So once he wrapped on “Monster,” with all the sacrifice he can’t quite admit to a journalist he made, it was time to find his way out.
“Finishing the job is one of the great challenges. Because if it’s really engaging and immersive, then there’s been this long period where one’s personal life has been horribly neglected. And I find life really challenging,” Hunnam says. “On set, you’re part of a massive project as part of a team; back home, “Oh, Christ, I’ve got to go back to cleaning the toilet.”
To accommodate Hunnam’s need to ease out of work, his partner of 20 years, the jewelry designer Morgana McNelis, has a rule: “Go do your thing, but when you come home, be ready to see me, because then you belong to me, motherfucker.” Hunnam took two days after production wrapped to travel to Gein’s grave. The resting place is unmarked but easy to find, because it’s near his family’s tombstones, and because the grave site is patchy; people take blades of grass or clumps of earth as relics.
“I wanted to say a few things and make it clear that he wasn’t going to be continuing on this journey,” Hunnam says. “Whilst I fully recognize the horror of the acts that he committed, my entire job was to find the truth. I felt compelled to say that to him.”
I ask whether, after performing that graveside declaration, Hunnam felt an energetic shift or a sense of relaxation: Life is really challenging, but maybe, for a moment, it felt less so? “No,” he says. “I felt like the journey had come to an end.”
All that was left to do was promote it, in a way he hasn’t been asked to do in years, and to wait and see how millions of viewers react to a story dredged out of horror-story reimaginings into something aiming for plainspoken truth. The show’s creators have high hopes. “I think it will be noisy and loud, and people will be moved and upset by it,” Brennan says — in other words, the perfect return-to-form for an actor who prefers complication.
If the shoot was tough, it was in part because Hunnam was being asked to do something next to impossible — to reintroduce a man known only for his predations as someone for whom we might feel. But Hunnam can’t complain. He and Winkler, he says, were given leeway to invent as they went and to be playful and imaginative, even in this darkest of storylines. “It was this creative, career-peak moment,” Hunnam says with a chuckle. “The lunatics had taken over the asylum.”
Photographed at the historic $70M Robert Taylor Ranch, reimagined by designer Malcolm James Kutner and represented by Rochelle Atlas Maize of Nourmand & Associates / rochellemaize.com and http://roberttaylorranch.com
Styling: Warren Alfie Baker/The Wall Group; Grooming: Kim Verbeck/The Wall Group; Look 1 (cover and feeding horses): Shirt: Kincaid Archive; Pants: World Vintage Showroom LA; Look 2 (tight portrait and leaning on fence): Shirt: RRL; Pants: World Vintage Showroom LA; Look 3 (jacket with name badge):
Jacket: World Vintage Showroom LA: Tank: Calvin Klein; Jeans: Vintage Levis; Belt: Kincaid Archive; Look 4 (seated on brick): Shirt and pants: World Vintage Showroom LA; Boots: Frye
Source link
