Charlie Hunnam reveals what he said to Ed Gein after Netflix’s Monster wrapped filming

Stepping into the shoes of a notorious serial killer is not for the faint of heart, so following the conclusion of filming for Netflix’s Monster season three, Charlie Hunnam visited the grave of Ed Gein to clear his head.

In eight graphic episodes of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Ryan Murphy once again dove headfirst into the mind of a deranged killer following the success of The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.

Sons of Anarchy frontman Charlie Hunnam was cast in the titular role, losing a ton of weight and altering his voice to truly take on the mantle of Ed Gein. Naturally, he needed to leave that all behind when returning to his normal life and longtime girlfriend, Morgana McNelis.

Despite not being married, Morgana and Charlie have been dating for nearly two decades. They keep their life incredibly private, but when he took the role in Netflix’s retelling of Ed’s story, she told him: “Take some time after you finish, because when you come home, you should be ready to see me.”

Charlie did just that, visiting Ed Gein’s grave in Plainfield, Wisconsin, after he’d died in a psychiatric hospital at the age of 77 in 1984.

“I’d been shooting in Chicago, I decided to stay for a week and sort of decompress so I was ready to see her when I got home,” Charlie said in a recent apperence on the Today show. “And it was about an eight-hour drive up to Wisconsin from where I was to where Ed grew up and where he’s buried.”

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Charlie believed it was a “good conclusion to go visit his grave and say what I wanted to say to him”, and while the conversation was obviously one-sided, he was able to shed that human skin mask before returning home. Charlie told Ed that he “hoped we had told his story honestly at the very least, and [I] didn’t invite him to come on the journey with me moving forward.”

“I was ready to say goodbye to him and that be the end,” he admitted.

In another interview with AP, Charlie admitted to spending “a lot” of time at Ed’s grave, talking to him as if “he was someone that you knew who had died. Like a regular person visiting a relative at a graveyard.”

Charlie Hunnam tried not to ‘judge’ Ed Gein

Wearing Ed Gein’s skin is ironic as it is disturbing, and as an actor, Charlie Hunnam was forced to really unpack his emotions, direction, and motives.

“I had to understand him. That was the thing. I didn’t have to like him, but I had to try to find my own sense of the truth, of what I thought he was and who I thought he was, and then have the courage of conviction to be faithful to that,” he told Forbes.

“And I ended up not feeling protective of Ed, but protective of my perception of who he was, and trying to tell the story as honestly as I could. And sometimes that felt dangerous. Sometimes I questioned, like, am I being overly empathetic? Am I being overly sympathetic? Is this, you know, is this honest? Is this true? And so that became my obsession, just trying to tell the story as truthfully as we possibly could.”

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news and drops, like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Featured image credit: AP/Netflix