Charlie Hunnam Worried Ed Gein Role Was 'A Horrible Mistake': 'There Might be No Coming Back From This'

Netflix’s hit anthology series, Monster, has garnered significant attention since it debuted in 2022. That high level of buzz is still apparent when it comes to the newest entry in the franchise. Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which is currently available with a Netflix subscription, is No. 1 on Netflix’s Top 10 for TV series, as of this writing. With that, various viewers are watching Charlie Hunnam play the famous killer, who the actor was initially concerned about playing.

via: EW

Charlie Hunnam was not initially too gung ho about playing serial killer and grave robber Ed Gein in the latest season of Netflix's Monster — in fact, he worried he'd made a terrible misstep taking on the shocking role.

"Once I said yes to this, I thought I'd made a horrible mistake," the English actor tells Entertainment Weekly. "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 season, the third in the horror anthology series, picks up in 1950s rural Wisconsin, and follows the titular monster – known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul – and tells the tale of his perverse crimes, which would go on to inspire the onscreen horrors seen in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.

Hunnam says he calmed down a bit when he actually read the scripts for the season, written by co-creator Ian Brennan. "There was sort of a breakthrough when I started reading the scripts and realizing that we were not going to be focusing on what he did and doing a deep dive on that, we're really gonna be focusing on why he did what he did and trying to find the human being behind the monster," he says.

To do so, the Sons of Anarchy star says he tried to "find the truth" of Gein, even though he couldn't relate to the heinous things he did. "There's like a human thread that connects all of this that you go like, right, that was a really bad avenue that you went down as a consequence or reaction to this thing that you experienced, but I understand what it was that you experienced and how that feels," he says. "And so it was sort of building on from that and just trying to make it human and honestly trying not to judge him, but being careful not to have too much empathy for him — it was a real tightrope to walk."

Hunnam, who admits he doesn't "really like the horror genre" or "impossibly dark, bleak stories," says the role was always "kind of a strange choice" for him. So much so that he was "truly gobsmacked" when series co-creator Ryan Murphy asked him to play Gein during a two-hour dinner conversation. "I just found myself saying yes," Hunnam admits. "Based, I would say like 99 percent of it, on just how much I liked Ryan."

And, now that it's all said and done (all eight episodes are now streaming on Netflix), Hunnam says that the process of playing Ed Gein taught him something about himself. "I think I learned the truth of like, that which you most need to find is where you least wish to look — you know, the greater the challenge, the greater the reward," he says.

And the challenge of inhabiting such a dark, gruesome world in a weird roundabout way brought a lot of joy and levity to the set. "We were challenging ourselves so much — we were really trying to do something good with this, it wasn't just like some superficial, gory, like whatever," he says. "We were really trying to apply ourselves in everything we knew about the human condition and everything we knew about filmmaking, and we managed on several occasions to rise to the level of our ambition. And as somebody who really cares about what they do, that feels amazing. So there was like a joy that came with challenging ourselves and occasionally reaching the star that we were grasping for.

"So it was good," Hunnam concludes. "It was a really beautiful experience. But, you know, definitely dark at times too, and there was times when we thought, 'How are we gonna get through the day?'"

Monster: The Ed Gein story is on Netflix now.