Charlie Hunnam’s new ‘Monster’: Actors on what it’s really like playing real serial killers

The man who brought you the dramatisation of serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers is ready to unveil his latest horrifying outing — Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story, starring Charlie Hunnam as the titular brute, releases October 3 on Netflix.

Ed Gein being the inspiration behind several pop culture classics, from Psycho to Silence of the Lambs, Hunnam had the monumental task of reinventing a personality the audience is all too familiar with. But that wasn’t all — he also had to embody the shudder inducing killer’s persona on a mental level.

And what’s scarier than a serial killer? Being inside the mind of one.

Here’s Charlie Hunnam and more actors who are familiar with the experience:

Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein

Since Charlie Hunnam was tasked to map Ed Gein’s origins from way before he ever became a serial killer, his experience had to be administered with a good dosage of empathy.

“You have to have an enormous amount of love and empathy for a character that you play to be able to inhabit them. Because as despicable as Ed was in his acts, I wanted to find the human in there,” he recently told Variety.

Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos

Charlize Theron played the rare breed of a female serial killer, Aileen Wuornos, in 2003’s Monster so well that she walked away with an Academy Award for her performance.

While showing a lot of understanding for the character, Theron also battled her fair share of demons, telling About Film, “The last killing, it was impossible. It was one of the worst nights of my life.”

Cameron Britton as Edmund Kemper

A much revered performance, Cameron Britton’s turn as Edmund Kemper in Mindhunter left him reeling from its after effects long after he had left the set.

“Sometimes Ed just lingers. It’s hard to get out of that energy,” he told Variety.

Damon Herriman as Charles Manson

Kemper’s co-star, though they never shared the screen, Damon Herriman chillingly portrayed the infamous cult leader and killer Charles Manson in two separate screen iterations — Mindhunter and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

While the latter performance was just a brief cameo, he described his time on Mindhunter to Variety by sharing that it was the “research” rather than the performance itself that was the “disturbing part” — “It didn’t matter how many times I’ve read about it or watched the documentary describing it, it absolutely chilled you to the bone to think what those people went through.”