Netflix has added another true crime series to their library, this time looking at the gruesome crimes of Ed Gein—a serial killer, also known as the Butcher of Plainfield and the Plainfield Ghoul, who murdered two women in the 1950s and exhumed corpses from local graveyards, fashioning keepsakes like clothing and household items from their bones and skin.
Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, Monster: The Ed Gein Story stars Charlie Hunnam as the “Godfather of serial killers.”
“I wanted to get as close as possible to who Ed was, to do him justice, and for this thing to feel authentic,” Charlie previously revealed in an interview with Tudum.
“This is going to be the really human, tender, unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of who Ed was and what he did. But who he was being at the centre of it, rather than what he did.”
To bring Ed Gein to life in the eight-part series, getting Gein's voice right was essential. Charlie had already started crafting what he felt was an accurate tone, but it wasn’t until he got access to rare audio tapes later in his preparation that everything clicked.
From there, Charlie fully committed to the transformation—physically and mentally. He refined Gein’s look, studied his unsettling mannerisms, and even travelled to his hometown and grave to better understand the disturbed world the killer came from.
Here's everything you need to know.
How Charlie Hunnam transformed into Ed Gein:
The Voice
To prepare the voice he’d been crafting, Charlie reached out to Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein producer Joshua Kunau, who provided access to a 70-minute audio interview with Gein, recorded the night of his arrest but inadmissible in court. The rare recording became a crucial tool in shaping Charlie’s vocal portrayal of the notorious killer.
“I started to see him through a series of affectations to please his mother,” Charlie told Variety. “That’s where the voice came from.”
Charlie’s understanding of the role deepened when he made a key discovery that Ed Gein was performing. “It was all an affectation,” Charlie explained to Tudum, in reference to Gein’s unusually soft, high-pitched voice.
“It was what Ed thought that his mother wanted him to be. It wasn’t an authentic voice that lived in him. It was this persona,” Charlie added.
Originally from Newcastle, the 45-year-old also had to adopt Gein's soft Wisconsin dialect, specific to the rural town of Plainfield in Waushara County, adding yet another layer to his transformation.
The look
Side-by-side images of Ed Gein and Charlie Hunnam are surprisingly similar. Whilst audiences are used to seeing Charlie with his long blonde hair and chiseled jawline, Netflix viewers had to look twice when they first saw him as Gein. He’s clean-shaven, with cropped, swept-back hair, and appears noticeably thinner, a deliberate choice by the 45-year-old actor to match Gein’s slight frame.
On how he transformed physically into Gein, Charlie told Tudum: “I lost almost 30 pounds just to get a more malnourished, light frame. Ed was incredibly lithe. And so that was a big part of the physicality.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about where his energy was, that he's not particularly confident or, like, front-foot type of energy. How to not take up a lot of space, not to be sort of front and centre and too confident in my physicality was really important.”
The character
Charlie previously admitted that he had “nightmares” about playing this part, wondering if he'd made a “mistake” when he realized just how “despicable” some of the stuff Gein did was.
On the character of Gein, Charlie said: “We tell a very, sort of, varied version, like an all-encompassing version of who he was. So the gruesomeness, but there's also a little bit of, I don't want to say tenderness, but you see the human in him."
He added to Tudum: “The more I got into learning about Ed, the more it became clear how big the distance was between who I am in my regular life and who Ed was.”
Following the series, Charlie thought it would be a “good conclusion” to visit Gein's grave.
At his grave, he told Gein, who died in 1984, that he “hoped we had told his story honestly at the very least, and [I] didn't invite him to come on the journey with me moving forward.”
“I was ready to say goodbye to him and that be the end,” Charlie added.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story is available to stream on Netflix.
