Charlie Hunnam said he went into Monster: The Ed Gein Story with very little knowledge of Ed Gein, then built the role from medical records, transcribed reviews and prosthetic work. The eight-part Netflix series puts that process at the center of a story about how a notorious killer is reconstructed on screen.
“It was initially pretty off-putting, because most of the books that have been published about him are these grotesque catalogs, sensationalizing the darker side of who he was and what he did,” Hunnam said of the source material. He said he was drawn instead to “understanding what went wrong in the human being that evolved into the monster,” a line that fits a production built around research as much as performance.
Ed Gein records on the page
Hunnam said, “He was incarcerated in a mental health facility for almost 30 years and did biannual reviews that were transcribed.” He added, “There were thousands and thousands of pages of his medical history available.” For a role like this, that kind of archive is the difference between playing a headline and playing a person; it gives an actor behavior, rhythm and enough detail to avoid flattening the character into the crime.
Ed Gein’s case has long sat inside the culture’s memory because his story inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs. The character Hunnam is playing also comes with the facts that Gein murdered at least two women and exhumed several bodies in the 1950s, then desecrated human cadavers to make a skin suit. That is the source material the series has to handle, and the records Hunnam used suggest the production is trying to approach it as a case study rather than a shortcut to shock.
Corey Castellano and Mark Nieman
Corey Castellano and Mark Nieman used a life cast of Hunnam’s face to map out the hooded eye effect. They sculpted multiple versions of the hooded lid and tested them on his face before settling on a final appliance made from thin silicone.
The appliance was glued on with a medical adhesive, its edges were blended with acetone, and the surface was painted with alcohol-based makeup in thin washes of color to match Hunnam’s skin tone. The process also added a forehead, eyebags, crow’s feet, frown lines and nasolabial folds along the side of the nose for different stages of aging, then finished with silver and gray in the brows to match the wig. That kind of build matters because it pushes the performance toward continuity: the voice and the face have to land together, or the illusion breaks.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story
The useful question now is not whether Hunnam changed enough; it is whether the series can make that accumulation of research, makeup and vocal work feel lived-in instead of forensic. With Monster: The Ed Gein Story positioned as an eight-part Netflix title, the craft inside the role is the headline. If the performance holds, the series gets more than another true-crime retelling — it gets a character study built from the archive, not just the mythology.
