Charlie Hunnam has undergone a remarkable transformation into killer Ed Gein, as seen in new posters (below) released for the Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story, premiering on October 3.
Hunnam is best known for playing the handsome and impulsive biker Jax Teller on FX’s hit series Sons of Anarchy.
From Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the new series’ logline reads as follows: Serial killer. Grave robber. Psycho. In the frozen fields of 1950s rural Wisconsin, a friendly, mild-mannered recluse named Eddie Gein (Hunnam) lived quietly on a decaying farm – hiding a house of horrors so gruesome it would redefine the American nightmare.
Driven by isolation, psychosis, and an all-consuming obsession with his mother, Gein’s perverse crimes birthed a new kind of monster that would haunt Hollywood for decades. From Psycho to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to The Silence of the Lambs, Gein’s macabre legacy gave birth to fictional monsters born in his image. It ignited a cultural obsession with the criminally deviant. Ed Gein didn’t just influence a genre — he became the blueprint for modern horror.
Known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul, Gein confessed to murdering two women in the 1950s and also allegedly made trophies out of bodies and skin of corpses he exhumed from graveyards. He is suspected of having been responsible for the deaths of others, including his brother Henry, but the authorities were unable to connect him definitively to any of the cases.
The cast also includes Laurie Metcalf as Gein’s mother, Augusta; Tom Hollander as Hitchcock, with Olivia Williams playing his wife Alma Reville; Addison Rae as Evelyn Hartley; Charlie Hall as Deputy Frank Worden, and Suzanna Son, in an unknown role. Olivia Williams, Lesley Manville, Joey Pollari, Tyler Jacob Moore, Mimi Kennedy, Will Brill, and Robin Weigert also star.
The Monster anthology series’ first two seasons focused on serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, followed by the Erik and Lyle Menendez Story, which has sparked renewed interest in the case. Season 4 is currently being developed with Ella Beatty taking on the lead role of Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted of the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, MA. Rebecca Hall and Vicky Krieps will also star.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story is executive produced by Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, Max Winkler, Eric Kovtun, Scott Robertson, Nissa Diederich, Louise Shore, Carl Franklin, and Charlie Hunnam. This season, Brennan will write and direct episodes 304 and 305, with Winkler tackling all the other Season 3 episodes up to the finale 308.
