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Charlie Hunnam got some useful feedback from his significant other after taking his work home with him.
The Monster: The Ed Gein Story star, 45, was asked at the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday, Jan. 4 if his longtime girlfriend, Morgana McNelis, had asked him to stop using the infamous murderer’s voice “around the house” while he was preparing for filming.
“She did,” Hunnam confirmed to Justin Sylvester during the E! pre-show. “I was slipping in and out of it all the time and she was saying, ‘Dude. You have to stop with the voice.'”
“At breakfast, it’s a little too much,” he joked.
Netflix
Hunnam, who had a rare public date night with McNelis at the 2025 Emmy Awards, is up for Monster’s only nomination at the 31st annual Critics Choice Awards in Santa Monica, Calif. The actor snagged a nod in the Best Actor in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television category this year.
In the series — which marks the third installment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series — Hunnam stars as Gein, whose crimes are believed to have inspired several horror films, such as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
In November, Hunnam caught up with PEOPLE at Netflix’s Tudum Theater in Hollywood when he shared that he first thought he made a “mistake” in his decision to play the titular murderer and grave robber.
“I mean, it got in my head…The most in my head. Before we started shooting, during the research period, everything that’s been written about Ed have been these sort of sensationalist, grotesque litanies of just horror,” he said. “And I really started to get scared that maybe I’d made a mistake and this was just going to be impossibly bleak and dark and a horrible process. And then there was a breakthrough.”
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That was when Hunnam “really read” Gein’s medical records, which he said “gave a less sensationalized depiction of who he was.”
“It was just the brass facts of his mental illness, his struggles with isolation, his emotional abandonment from his mother. And I just started to see the human,” Hunnam said.
He added, “Because that’s what we were really trying to do, is just find the human story within this, ask the question what creates a monster and why this man did the things that he did, and less interested in what he did, and really very interested in trying to answer the question why he did what he did.”
Hunnam is up for the award alongside Michael Chernus, Stephen Graham, Brian Tyree Henry, Matthew Rhys and Michael Shannon.
See PEOPLE’s full coverage of the 31st annual Critics Choice Awards Sunday, Jan. 4 as they air live on E! and USA Network at 7 p.m. ET from the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, Calif.
