NEED TO KNOW
Charlie Hunnam had some second thoughts about his decision to portray Ed Gein.
The Monster: The Ed Gein Story star, 45, revealed to Entertainment Weekly in an interview published on Monday, Oct. 6, that he initially wasn’t too confident in his decision to play the show’s titular murderer and grave robber.
“Once I said yes to this, I thought I’d made a horrible mistake,” Hunnam said. “I started researching it, reading all the books about Ed Gein, and I fell into a full panic. I just thought there might be no coming back from this. This is so dark, to inhabit this character.”
The notorious murderer, who was initially arrested in 1957 and died in 1984, was widely known for exhuming human remains, using them as everyday items, and, largely, for the belief that his crimes inspired several horror films, such as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
As Hunnam explained, there was a “breakthrough” when he started to read the script, “realizing that we were not going to be focusing on what he did and doing a deep dive on that,” but rather “focusing on why he did what he did and trying to find the human being behind the monster.”
Netflix
Hunnam told EW that he doesn’t “really like the horror genre,” making the job “kind of a strange choice” for him. He was also “truly gobsmacked” when Ryan Murphy offered him the part over dinner, he added.
“I just found myself saying yes,” Hunnam said. “Based, I would say like 99 percent of it, on just how much I liked Ryan.”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
On Sept. 30, Hunnam caught up with PEOPLE at the show’s premiere held at The Plaza Hotel in New York City, where he explained that despite the subject matter of Monster, creating the project was “joyous and light.”
“So there’s the subject matter and then there’s [the] actual process,” Hunnam said. “And we all felt really good about the work we were doing. And so, actually, in terms of the experience we had of trying to make this show every day — just the actual putting our craft into effect — it was actually really joyous and light.”
He added, “We were proud of ourselves and we were reaching for something. And not every day, but more often than not, managing to grab a hold of it. So it was really actually — I don’t want to say a fun experience […] but it was very satisfying and a beautiful experience.”
The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!
“Finding the truth” in the character of Gein, Hunnam said, was “the whole process.”
“We were much more interested in why Ed did what he did, rather than exploring what he did. Everybody sort of knows what he did, and it’s been chronicled in many films that he inspired and then direct adaptation to his life. And so that was clearly the mission right from the beginning,” he said.
Hunnam stars in Monster alongside Tom Hollander, Laurie Metcalf and Suzanna Son, with Vicky Krieps, Olivia Williams, Lesley Manville, Addison Rae, Joey Pollari, Charlie Hall, Tyler Jacob Moore, Mimi Kennedy, Will Brill and Robin Weigert filling out the cast. It marks the third installment of Murphy’s anthology series, which previously explored the legacies of Jeffrey Dahmer and Lyle and Erik Menendez.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story is available to stream in full on Netflix.
