Charlie Hunnam Went Deep For Ed Gein Role, and Dug Up a Chilling Lost Tape For MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY
Charlie Hunnam, who is best known for playing a motorcycle club outlaw in the series Sons of Anarchy, has also played a sci-fi hero, King Arthur of the round table, a British gangster, and an escaped Australian prisoner, but he ventured into new territory in the upcoming Netflix limited series Monster: The Ed Gein Story, where he takes on the persona of one of the most notorious serial killers of all time.
The first full trailer got fans talking, and not just because of the grotesque content, but also for the surprising voice that Hunnam used to bring Ed Gein to life. “The voice needed to be really specific,” Hunnam explained to Variety, “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.”
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.
Alongside Hunnam, the cast features Tom Hollander, Laurie Metcalf, Suzanna Son, Vicky Krieps, Olivia Williams, Lesley Manville, Joey Pollari, Charlie Hall, Tyler Jacob Moore, Mimi Kennedy, Will Brill, Greyson K. Reilly, and Robin Weigert.
The series will be available this weekend on Netflix.