Ryan Murphy casts Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein, continues trend of glamorizing serial killers
Horror aficionado Ryan Murphy is back with a third installment of his Netflix series, "Monster," casting actor Charlie Hunnam as the notorious 20th-century killer and grave robber, Ed Gein.
Murphy made the casting announcement on Monday at the premiere of his show's second season, "Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story," which offers a fictional account of two brothers who were convicted of the 1996 killing of their parents. The second season is set to debut on September 19, with Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch starring in the titular roles, and Javier Bardem and Chlo? Sevigny playing the brothers' parents, José and Mary Louise "Kitty" Menendez.
Hunnam, who previously acted in the drama series "Sons of Anarchy," will transform into Gein — the Butcher of Plainfield from Wisconsin — who confessed to the killing of two women and reportedly robbed freshly dug graves to create a stockpile of anatomical paraphernalia, using human body parts to make lamps, masks, clothing, and more. Gein's morbid story would go on to serve as key inspiration for a number of popular horror films, including Alfred Hitchcock's Norman Bates in "Psycho," Leatherface of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and "Silence of the Lambs" killer, Buffalo Bill.
"Monster" originally debuted in 2022 with another notable Wisconsin murderer: Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal known for murdering — and in several cases, consuming — 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991. Many of the victims were gay men of color.
The series was widely acclaimed with lead performances from "American Horror Story" alumni Evan Peters and Niecey Nash, with each actor respectively winning a Golden Globe and Emmy Award for their portrayals. As noted by Variety, season one of "Monster" currently holds the position of the third most-watched show in Netflix history.
Despite the popularity of Murphy's Dahmer, the show unsurprisingly stoked considerable controversy, leading many to question Murphy's consistent glamorization of very bad people. Much of the backlash came from families of Dahmer's victims, who claimed the series put them through hell all over again. Rita Isbell, sister of Errol Lindsey — who was among those Dahmer killed— wrote in a 2022 essay for Insider that she was "never contacted about the show," which re-dramatized the emotional victim impact statement she gave at the killer's real-life sentencing in 1992.
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"I feel like Netflix should’ve asked if we mind or how we felt about making it," Isbell said. "They didn’t ask me anything. They just did it.” Isbell added, “But I’m not money hungry, and that’s what this show is about, Netflix trying to get paid.”
Isbell and Lindsey's cousin, Eric Perry, tweeted about the show's "retraumatizing" effects in 2022, writing "I’m not telling anyone what to watch, I know true crime media is huge rn, but if you’re actually curious about the victims, my family (the Isbell’s) are pissed about this show. It’s retraumatizing over and over again, and for what? How many movies/shows/documentaries do we need?”
"Like recreating my cousin having an emotional breakdown in court in the face of the man who tortured and murdered her brother is WILD. WIIIIIILD," Perry added in a follow-up post.
"Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story" also spawned an eccentric — and ethically questionable — trend of "thirsting" over Dahmer (but really, Petersen's good looks), racking up millions of TikToks pegged to the killer being "kinda cute," and actively sympathizing with him. It was another, unsettling iteration of the rockstar-ification of '70s serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy (played by another handsome dude, Zac Efron, in a 2019 biopic). As Kady Ruth Ashcraft opined for Jezebel in 2022, "While the true crime genre has rightly received its fair share of criticism for transforming gruesome crimes into entertainment at the expense of the well-being of survivors, people announcing they are 'unbothered' by Dahmer’s crimes feels like a new level of desensitization."
Now, with Hunnam — another blatantly attractive lead actor — set to helm a performance about Gein, we can only assume that a similar pattern of social media desensitization will ensue.