Charlie Hunnam Cast As Ed Gein in Netflix’s Monster

Charlie Hunnam will star in the next installment of the Netflix anthology series Monster, which will focus on the grisly story of serial killer Ed Gein. Active during the 1950s, Gein was responsible for a string of murders that inspired horror movie characters like Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.

The news about Hunnam coming on board was confirmed by series co-creator Ryan Murphy at an event promoting the second season of the series, which is centered on the Menendez Brothers.

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story follows the highly successful and Emmy-winning Monsters: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Netflix ordered additional entries after the first season crested over 1 billion hours of watch time; the streamer reports the show as the third most-watched in company history.

In the period after that initial renewal, Murphy described a plan to “tell the stories of other monstrous figures who have impacted society,” and Gein certainly fits the bill. Not only did he kill multiple people before his arrest in 1957, he had also taken to exhuming corpses from a local cemetery to create keepsakes from human body parts.

With Monster, Hunnam will be returning to television, where he first found a major mainstream breakthrough via Sons of Anarchy. Revisit our reviews of his most recent film projects, which include Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon.