How Charlie Hunnam reinvented himself with 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story'

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Set us as preferred Before committing to a new role, English actor Charlie Hunnam reads the script up to five or six times.A self-admitted overthinker, he considers every variable ad nauseum.But when TV mogul Ryan Murphy suggested during their first meeting that Hunnam should play Ed Gein, the notorious serial killer who inspired Norman Bates in “Psycho” and Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs,” the actor agreed on the spot.“There I was without reading a word of it, just said yes, and then had to actually show up and do the job,” Hunnam, 46, says during a video call from Prague.

He’s made it inside just in time to escape the rain, droplets from the downpour still visible on his white T-shirt.It was hearing Murphy speak of his creative process that bewitched Hunnam into that “Yes.” An aspiring screenwriter himself, Hunnam has penned a project for Max Winkler, who’s also the main director on “Monster.”The resulting performance in Netflix’s “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” an equal parts disturbing and humanistic portrayal of an abused and mentally ill man, earned Hunnam his first Emmy nomination, for lead actor in a limited series or TV movie.Intending to become “the world’s authority on Ed Gein,” the actor read numerous books on his character.Most of them, he says, are “sensationalist catalogs of his darkest misdeeds.” Gein murdered at least two women, as well as illegally exhumed and mutilated multiple corpses, in the 1940s and 1950s.

He was arrested in 1957.“When I started doing my research, I got really panicked and thought that I’d made a horrible mistake and this was just going to be impossibly dark,” Hunnam recalls.Getting access to Gein’s medical records represented a turning point for the actor.These documents depicted a person suffering from schizophrenia who had endured neglect and isolation at his mother’s hands; the clarity that Gein attained and ...