Charlie Hunnam had no idea he was being courted to play Ryan Murphy’s latest monster. 

When the star of Sons of Anarchy met the creator of Monster, American Horror Story, and Feud, he was just happy to chat. “Ryan arrived at our meeting and told me that he had just been caught up in a creative tailwind,” says Hunnam. “And that segued into us having this really deep, emotional, fascinating conversation about Ed Gein, who he had been writing about for the last three or four days.”

Hunnam found himself saying aloud, “Goodness, I can’t wait to see this show. This sounds wonderful.” Murphy responded, “So, do you want to play him?” 

It’s a tall order to ask any actor to spend months inside the head of a figure like Gein, a notorious body snatcher and serial killer who haunted the fields of rural Wisconsin in the 1950s, murdering and gruesomely desecrating his victims. Fortunately for Murphy, Hunnam was already sold. Monster: The Ed Gein Story was on the way. You can see the foreboding teaser trailer for the new season above.

A year later, with Monster: The Ed Gein Story about to premiere, Murphy reveals the surprising inspiration behind Hunnam’s casting. “I saw a paparazzi photograph of [Charlie] somewhere and I was like, ‘Oh, he seems haunted,’ ” Murphy recalls. “There was something very Ed about him on that day.”

“I must have been having a bad day,” Hunnam deadpans.

Murphy and Monster co-creator Ian Brennan (Glee, The Watcher) know a bit about bad days. Over the course of these three seasons of television, they’ve examined the lives of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and now Ed Gein, whose chilling tale arrives in October. “I think this is the best season of the three, and I think it’s going to blow people’s socks off,” Brennan, who wrote every episode of the new season, tells Tudum.  

Gein makes a brief appearance in DAHMER, in which he’s played by Shane Kerwin. But the real-life figure remains relatively little-known compared to the infamous killers who anchored the first two seasons of Monster.

“Ed Gein’s fairly obscure,” says Brennan. “It’s this man who lived in a farmhouse and didn’t know very many people, and you’re watching his descent into deep, deep madness and then ultimately into killing people. That seemed like a big ask for a show that has been quite popular. Is that too much to ask of a global audience?”

Brennan and Murphy soon found their way in. Gein himself may not be a household name, but the characters he inspired are. Filmmakers as disparate as Alfred Hitchcock, Tobe Hooper, and Jonathan Demme drew on Gein for inspiration in, respectively, the iconic films Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). “There’s something about this story that has really echoed down the ages,” Brennan says. “That’s when it clicked.” 

So Monster: The Ed Gein Story proves to be more than just a tale of the frozen Wisconsin wastes — it also heads to Hollywood, folding in Alfred Hitchcock himself (Tom Hollander) as he works on Psycho. Hollander’s Hitchcock narrates the beginning of the season’s new teaser trailer: “What shocks you most about him?” he asks, over footage of Gein’s home being searched by the police, and the grotesque findings they unearth. “What was his childhood like?” It’s as if the Master of Suspense himself is asking for pointers.

Hitchcock wasn’t alone in this. “[Gein] is probably one of the most influential people of the 20th century, and yet people don’t know that much about him,” Murphy says. “He influenced some of the biggest serial killers of the 20th century — which is another thing that I think people did not and do not know about him — Ted Bundy, and on and on and on.” 

Hunnam dove deep into research for the role, but found himself struggling with the tone of the material he encountered. “I read every book that’s been written on Ed Gein, and I didn’t find many of them very useful, to be honest,” Hunnam says. “They were all sort of grossly sensationalist — these grotesque, impossibly bleak pieces of writing.”

So Hunnam turned to a primary source. “I was able to get access to the only known recording of Ed Gein, which was made two days after he was arrested,” he says. “It’s about an hour-and-10-minute interview with him, while he’s in custody. A lot of the musicality, and his inflection, and his choice of words, and where his energy sat, I was able to extract from it.”

Ed’s thorny dynamic with his mother, here played by Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird, JFK, Desperately Seeking Susan), is a critical part of the story, so Hunnam made sure he got know Metcalf before the cameras started rolling. “When we got the scripts, we would call each other, and talk about them a lot, and a really close, beautiful collaboration started to evolve,” he says. “I learned a lot from her and I really value getting to work with her on this.”  

The cast and crew of Monster: The Ed Gein Story were determined to do justice to a story that had never been told before. “I wanted to get as close as possible to who Ed
was, to do him justice, and for this thing to feel authentic,” Hunnam says. 

“The thesis statement of every season is: are monsters born or are they made?” Murphy adds. “I think in Ed’s case, it's probably a little of both.”

For its star, the heart of Monster: The Ed Gein Story lies in a simple proposition. “This is going to be the really human, tender, unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of who Ed was and what he did,” says Hunnam. “But who he was being at the center of it, rather than what he did.”

Monster: The Ed Gein Story hits Netflix on Oct. 3.