By the day of the screen test, Hunnam had fully transformed.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I just saw this thing turn around the corner of this farmhouse that we built on stage, I looked over and it was him. It was Ed Gein,” says this season’s showrunner and writer Ian Brennan. “It was just the haircut, the look, the prosthetic and just how he was carrying himself. It sort of took my breath away.”
The physical transformation was just the beginning of the show’s demands. Some scenes, a few of which involved chainsaws, were shot outdoors in Central Illinois, in what Brennan described as record cold. In other cases, the sensitive subject matter required an intimacy coordinator or a choreographer. Later in the season, as Gein plunges further into his depraved experimentation with the dead, he exhumes a fresh body from the graveyard, lays said body on a kitchen table in a room oozing with filth and pests, and has sex with it for an excruciatingly long time. This being a Ryan Murphy production, it’s preceded with some light accordion foreplay.
“He has to play ‘La Vie en Rose’ with a polka beat,” says Murphy. “And that was the thing where Charlie was like, ‘Oh my God, this accordion.’ I was like, ‘You don’t have any [rewrites] on the sex scene?’ He was like, ‘No, piece of cake.’”
“There are very few times when you’re directing something where you’re like, ‘Oh, this is TV history here,’” says Brennan. “I don’t think anybody’s really attempted something as strange as this.” He recalls Murphy watching a cut of the episode and asking, “‘Are we going to to get away with that?’” “Then when Netflix watched the cuts—no notes,” says Brennan.
After production wrapped, Hunnam traveled to Gein’s unmarked grave in Plainfield, Wisconsin, to say goodbye for good. “Where it became really complicated is: My job is to not judge my character at all,” says Hunnam. ”There’s every chance that I will be very criticized for giving him too much empathy, and really I just had to follow my instinct.” But, ever the philosopher, Hunnam also knows that his hard-fought self-awareness only gets him so far. “It is all being filtered through my own unconscious bias of probably wanting to be liked,” he says. “And so I’m not even aware of to what degree that plays into the choices that I made.”
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