Charlie Hunnam on Playing Ed Gein in Monster

“My partner had incredible conviction that this was an important thing to do,” Charlie said. “She’s a great fan of the psychoanalysts, so she understands shadow work and the value of staring into the abyss and confronting the darkness much more than I do. So she was an amazing support to me, saying, ‘You just got to go do this thing, you got to enter the cave and face the dragon.’”

And face the dragon he did, delving deep inside himself and the mind of Ed to bring this role to life.

“I felt a huge obligation and responsibility because he was a real person, and also exacerbated by the fact that he had committed all of these terrible crimes,” the 45-year-old explained. “I wanted to find the truth of it. Right from my early conversation with Ryan, we were less interested in what he did, but we really wanted to understand why he did what he did, and take the audience and take ourselves through that journey of understanding how a human being becomes a monster.”