Charlie Hunnam is making the most of his starring turn in the third season of Ryan Murphy's controversial Monster anthology series. This time, he's taking on the lead role of suspected serial killer and body snatcher Ed Gein in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, sharing his take on the convicted murderer. The season also stars Suzanna Son, Vicky Krieps and Laurie Metcalf, and while it has received mixed to negative reviews from critics, there's no denying it's certainly making waves online.
Chief among them has been the famously handsome Brit's transformation into the infamous killer, who gained notoriety in the 1950s for going on a murderous spree and robbing graves to concoct various household items from human remains. The actor, 45, spoke with People at the show's premiere earlier this weekend about getting into the skin of a "monster," so to speak.
"He'd been abused, he was left in isolation, so he had no real social context to reflect back to him, normal behavior," he noted of Ed Gein's physical state that he hoped to depict. "And he was a very skinny, malnourished type of guy. So I mean, first of all, basically the basic first step was losing 30 pounds so I could look like him."
Charlie also endeavored to get into Ed's mind, especially reflecting on his toxic relationship with his mother Augusta (played by Laurie), who "told him every day of his life that she hated him because he wasn't born the girl, the daughter that she always wanted," and he was "imagining what the consequence of that would be when she was the only person he had a relationship with."
"That really informed the voice work that we did and how he would interact with his mother and the world, which was really trying to really be the daughter that she wanted," he continued. He explained that a majority of his creative process involved "finding the truth," in an aim to dig deeper into his mind to understand why he'd commit the horrific crimes before his conviction and eventual death in 1984.
"We were much more interested in why Ed did what he did, rather than exploring what he did," he noted, touching on the same themes that made the first two seasons, centering around Jeffrey Dahmer then Lyle and Erik Menendez, so divisive. "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."
"We, I think, felt confident that if we remain true to that, of just trying to find the truth in reflecting back this bizarre, tiny, dark corner of the human condition that he manifested, that we were staying true to the traditions of storytelling, which is to try to help us understand ourselves because we're all so bizarre, even the most normal of us. But Ed was very bizarre."
While Ryan Murphy did co-create the Monster series with Ian Brennan, this season saw only Ian serve as showrunner, the first not to feature Ryan at the helm. All eight episodes were released on Netflix on October 3.