The actor has dispelled some of the criticism levelled at his controversial new show
Right now, everyone is discussing Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
The latest instalment of Ryan Murphy’s Monster series – which has explored the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers – recently dropped on Netflix and is proving just as controversial as its previous iterations.
The current series focuses on Ed Gein, whose crimes – including murder and grave robbing – inspired the popular horror novel and subsequent film Psycho. The contents of the series, given their particularly difficult subject matter, have been subject to criticism, with some critics labelling the show “depraved”.
However, in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Charlie Hunnam who plays Gein, defended the show’s depiction.
“I never felt like we were sensationalizing it,” he said. “I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could.”
He also suggested that the show poses questions around culpability.
“Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and went and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalised it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?” he asked.
He then added: “Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?”
