Charlie Hunnam on Transforming Into Ed Gein for Netflix’s ‘Monster’

Charlie Hunnam didn’t hesitate to take on the role of serial killer and body snatcher Ed Gein in Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story. That is, until he started researching the horrific crimes that were committed.

“Being confronted with some of those images of the crime scenes, I really started to get afraid of the darkness and what it was going to be like to inhabit that,” Hunnam tells THR.

Then he got access to Gein’s medical records, which shed light on the factors that led to his declined mental state, marking a turning point for Hunnam. Thirty pounds lighter, with a prosthetic eyelid, a higher vocal octave and months of mental preparation, Hunnam became Gein. His dedication to the role scored the 46-year-old actor his first Emmy nomination, following Golden Globe, Actor and Critics Choice Award nods. Overall, the Netflix limited series received a total of seven Emmy nominations, including two for makeup, prosthetic and nonprosthetic.

Hunnam talks with THR about his first conversations with Murphy, committing to Gein’s voice and his most challenging scene.

How much did you know about Ed Gein before signing on?

I know a lot about other facets of the world of crime, like the Mafia and the Mexican drug war, but I don’t know as much about the serial killer subgenre and did not know anything about Ed Gein prior to my first meeting with Ryan, which I didn’t even know was to discuss Ed Gein. I thought it was just our mutual friend Max Winkler [who directed and executive produced the show] putting us together because they worked [together] a lot and Ryan had been asking Max a lot of questions about me. … We ended up having a three-hour, pretty engaged discussion about storytelling in general, but specifically more and more about the story he was telling. And then, at around the three-hour mark, he just sort of turned around and said, “I think you should play him. What do you think about that?” By that point, I was so taken with Ryan as a person. I was enjoying the conversation and being in his presence so much that before I knew what I had done, I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.”

Did you have any hesitation playing Ed?

Initially, I didn’t. The scripts weren’t available for a long period of time because that first meeting when I agreed to do it, Ryan was just breaking the first episode, and so then I set about wanting to learn everything I possibly could about Ed Gein and doing research on my own terms, and that ended up being the only moment in the process that was filled with fear and doubt because all of the texts that have been written about Ed are these pretty grotesque, sensationalized accounts of all the brutality and horrendous details of the things that he did, which were just terrible, and being confronted with some of those images of the crime scenes, I really started to get afraid of the darkness and what it was going to be like to inhabit that. There was a moment where I felt like maybe I’d made a mistake, and I was waking up in the middle of the night, really fearful of it, and just anticipating the process to be sort of pitch black. Then, there was a turning point where I was able to access his medical records, because he was incarcerated in a mental health facility for 30 years and did these biannual reviews, and the transcripts of all of those were not somebody else’s account who was sort of reveling in the darkness and depravity of the subject matter. It was a human being grappling with the regret of his actions and trying to understand why he did what he did, and trying to unravel this incredibly complex relationship with his mother [played by Laurie Metcalf]. And that brought me back to the original conversation I had with Ryan — that what he was trying to explore was what makes a human being into a monster.

I’d love to talk about your physical transformation.

I was in fairly decent shape but wasn’t aware of just how thick I was. About three and a half weeks before we started shooting, I had my first costume fitting, and then being in those clothes, it was a really anxiety-inducing experience because I just didn’t feel like I looked right. When I put those clothes on, I realized I was so much bigger, fuller and healthier looking than Ed was. That was this horrendous moment where I thought, “Oh fuck, I’ve got to lose an enormous amount of weight.” I dropped 30 pounds in that three and a half weeks. … One of the things that I felt from the research that really had an impact on Ed was this eye that he had that had been described as a very flabby lid that hung over and gave him this somewhat tragic look in some angles and somewhat sinister in other angles. I thought it’d be a really great tool. So to Corey [Castellano], our wonderful makeup artist, I expressed that I wanted to do that eye, but we ran into a bit of a roadblock with Ryan, who just felt like it was going to be distracting unless it was done flawlessly. Then there was going to be an enormous amount of postproduction at great cost to make sure it was always fixed any time it didn’t look perfect, but I don’t think he necessarily knew just what an expert Corey is in his field, and so we did three tests of that before we finally convinced Ryan to let us do it.

How long were you in the makeup chair for every day?

We started at about an hour and a half, and then we got that down to about 45 minutes towards the end. You know, we did it once, and the application just got faster and faster. But you know, our wonderful hair department are pretty sort of obsessive, compulsive perfectionists, and so they also wanted to cut my hair every day. I got a haircut every single day just to make sure that the whole thing was tight and correct.

What about the mental preparation? Your partner said that you spoke in the voice at home.

Yeah. I didn’t think there were any recordings [of his voice]. I actually found a recording, but not until a week before we started to shoot. So a lot of that was invention. The starting point was understanding the consequence of being isolated and having no social group and only having interaction with one person, and then that person, his mother, telling him every day of his life that she hated him, that he wasn’t born the daughter that she wanted. We’re all looking for acceptance, validation and love. I knew that later on in his life, a lot of the more bizarre areas of his behavior were an effort to become the thing that he thought that his mother wanted him to be, but I thought that the voice would be an interesting way to demonstrate that, and so just playing around in that higher vocal range and trying to be the daughter that he knew that his mother wanted him to be. Then I got the tapes and was like, “Oh my God, it’s nothing like how he actually spoke.” Some of the actual range and intonation I had intuited, I’d sort of gotten right, but he had a very deep and folksy type of rhythm to his voice. But at that point, I was committed, and so we just decided to go for it.

You talking about how his mother treated him, that’s the whole debate of nature vs. nurture, right?

If you look at genetics, what the scientists are starting to understand now, and I’m certainly no scientist, is that it’s really about epigenetics. It’s like, a predisposition is definitely not the same as a predetermination, and it’s almost impossible to understand genetics outside of environment. And so you might have a predisposition to do something, but unless that is triggered by some sort of trauma or collection of events that are presented in your environment, it’s not necessarily going to manifest. And my sense was, Ed, he certainly had mental illness. He had dissociative personality disorder, which was presumably developed later in life as a consequence of trauma, but he was born with schizophrenia, and then there’s also all of the trauma, the isolation and the abuse, and it also seemed like he probably had some sort of psychological stunting that he probably had the mental age of somebody more like 12 or 14, which I don’t know if that was [something] that he was born with, or if it was a consequence of arrested development due to some big trauma in his life.

Which scene was the most challenging for you?

I was very excited by this idea that at the heart of the show is going to be a sincere exploration of mental illness. There tends to be one scene in any given show or movie that is the sort of thesis [or] mission statement, and to me that was the scene when Ed gets his diagnosis in episode seven, and so that scene always felt more important, that we were really going to define and declare who Ed was, at least through our prism of understanding. That was the one that was the ticking time bomb in the back of my mind, where I just kept thinking, “I can’t fuck this one up. This is the opportunity to articulate everything that I think that I know about this character,” and I was really scared to do that scene. I [read] it the first time, and then decided I was just going to not look at it too much. … We did two takes, but Max only used the first take in the show.

Did you add your own improv to any of the other dialogue or did you pretty much stick to the script?

Ryan was so kind and generous to me. Early on, he called me and said he was so happy that I was doing the show, and he said, “I really just get a sense from you that you’re going to go all the way with this, and I want to give you all of the latitude and authority to be able to make this your own. So, I’d like you to come on and actually be an executive producer and not just a vanity credit, but work with Max and actually operate in a producorial capacity on the show,” because he knew that I produced a few things, actually, like hands-on, really produced. A lot of actors get credits with absolutely no producorial responsibility, and I myself have received that before, and always feel a little guilty about it because producing is a really hard job. But that’s all to say that Ryan gave me huge latitudes to make it my own, and their dialogue is so damn good that there was never really any reason to go off book. But I did find myself just having such a good time being inside that character, which is crazy to say because I was really hyper aware of that it was a real person. We have a lot of responsibility in that, and he also did terrible things and there were really terrible real life consequences to a lot of human beings that came into contact with him. But at the same time, there was something in really wanting to challenge myself and just surrendering to having the experience of being that person, that felt artistically really satisfying and kind of liberating. It was like so far away from me that I was able to sort of get lost in it, and would find the creative process enjoyable. That I thought that I knew so much about him, had such a clear idea of my perception of him that I was able to just play in the scenes. And so I did end up improvising quite a lot while also trying to honor the material that was so good.

Did you ever have to decompress after a scene?

I adopted a couple of kittens while I was in Chicago for the second half of it, and I was staying in a really nice hotel. I mean, not all the time because we were out in the middle of nowhere, and some of the accommodation was like truly horrendous. But while we were in actual Chicago, I was staying at the Four Seasons because Max, the director, had a friend there who got a decent rate, and I wanted to be close to Max because I knew we’d be talking a lot. So I had this like really lovely room in the Four Seasons, and they were so kind to me. And I came home one day, I’m like, “listen, I know this is a wild card, but like, I just adopted these two kittens. Can I can I keep them in my room?” And they were like, “Yeah, tell us anything you need.” I’m a very serious pet owner. I had to hire a cat sitter because obviously I work 14, 15 hours a day. I wasn’t going to just leave them alone for that period of time, and so then I had a cat sitter with them for like eight hours. They went from the streets to really coming up in life and living that Four Seasons life with a full time cat sitter playing with them. So I would go home from the darkest realm and just literally play with kittens for three hours.

What is your response to people calling true-crime shows like this sensationalism?

I’ve not had to answer that question very much, and sort of gratefully so. I think Ryan gets asked that question a lot, and I would say probably my media training would say that’s a question for Ryan, but that’s not my answer. I would say, we are tasking ourselves with finding the truth of the human condition, and it’s not necessarily my job to judge the value or potential consequence of it. I think it’s my job, if we’re going to tell a story like this, to really sincerely find the truth of it, and that was an obsession. I have a horrible memory, so I would not claim this at the moment, because even 18 months past the experience, I’ve forgotten a lot. But like, I would have taken the Pepsi Challenge against any other Ed Gein scholar in the world going into this. I read everything. I read all of his court documents, all of his medical history, every single book that’s been written on him. I watched all of the movies. I only say that in there’s a fine line between sensationalism and finding the truth, and I never wanted to tip over into sensationalism. To me, the obsession was like, let’s find the truth of who this guy was, and then let the audience decide how they feel about him. I couldn’t afford to have really any strong judgment. I did initially go into all of the research, I was so repelled by it, but I just kept moving forward, and trying to just learn as much as I could, and then try to bring that truth to bear with as little judgment as possible.

This story first appeared in a July stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.