Charlie Hunnam was unbothered by some of the more gruesome sex scenes in Monster season 3, it seems.
One moment in the Netflix anthology series, released on Friday, October 3, featured Hunnam as late serial killer Ed Gein playing the accordion to “La Vie en Rose” just before having sex — with a body he had just exhumed.
“That was the thing where Charlie was like, ‘Oh my God, this accordion,’” the anthology series’ creator, Ryan Murphy, recalled during an interview with GQ, published on Wednesday, October 8. “I was like, ‘You don’t have any [rewrites] on the sex scene?’ He was like, ‘No, piece of cake.’”
Murphy, along with members of the show’s crew, praised Hunnam for his transformation to take on this rather dark role.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I just saw this thing turn around the corner of this farmhouse that we built on stage, I looked over and it was him. It was Ed Gein,” showrunner and writer Ian Brennan recalled during the same interview. “It was just the haircut, the look, the prosthetic and just how he was carrying himself. It sort of took my breath away.”
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Hunnam, 45, might have lost 30 pounds and got a prosthetic lazy eye put on every day to play Gein, but his initial similarities to the convicted killer helped Murphy, 59, cast the Sons of Anarchy alum.
“He had a very similar face shape to Ed, a jail photograph of Ed that I had seen,” Murphy said. The two men met early last year and got to work.
Murphy was quick to learn the power of Hunnam.
“Listen, a broom falls in love with Charlie Hunnam,” Murphy told GQ. “I’ve worked with one other actor who had that ability, and that was Meryl Streep.”
He continued, “The men love Charlie, the women love Charlie, the crew loves Charlie. I think you either want to sleep with Charlie or you want to be Charlie. And the line is pretty thin for a lot of people — and it’s not because he’s overtly flirtatious; he’s not. He’s very shy. But his spirit and his heart is so big. It’s almost like this, I don’t know, there’s just this secret little glimmer in his eye.”
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It’s almost like fans can’t keep their eyes off him, which is similar to what Hunnam’s character Gein says in Monster.
“You’re the one who can’t look away,” Gein declares in one scene, seemingly addressing the audience.
“One of the primary questions we ask in the show is, ‘Who was the Monster?’ This boy who did terrible things but has been abused and left in isolation with untreated mental health issues,” Hunnam said on the Today show earlier this month. “All this legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it for entertainment, and arguably darkened the American psyche in the process.”
He added, “Prior to, actually, Ed Gein, our relationships to monsters in cinema were like Dracula and Frankenstein and werewolves. And Psycho was the pivot point where we became the monsters.”