Charlie Hunnam’s much-talked-about physical transformation for Monster: The Ed Gein Story includes an eye prosthetic that’s raised a lot of questions.
Right off the bat, fans of the British star were quick to notice that Hunnam’s left eye looked a little different on the Netflix show. The actor took on the role of late serial killer Ed Gein for the third installment in Ryan Murphy’s series, which premiered on Friday, October 3.
While Hunnam had to sit through hours in the makeup chair to create the lazy eye for the camera, it was to ensure that Hunnam portrayed an accurate representation of Gein as the murderer was born with a lazy eye.
Gein — also known as the Butcher of Plainfield — was a serial murderer and grave robber throughout the 1940s and 1950s in Wisconsin. Before his killing spree began, Gein was an outcast and multiple reports claim that he was bullied at school for having a lazy eye.
Professional makeup artist Corey Castellano offered an inside look into how he and prosthetics artist Mark Nieman created the look on Hunnam every day.
“Monster: The Ed Gein Story dropped today on #netflixseries and I wanted to share a little #BTS of our daily routine with the amazing Charlie Hunnam,” Castellano captioned an Instagram video on Friday. “Every day for months @mark_nieman and I applied this delicate hooded lid appliance. Charlie sat like a champ and wore it like a pro.”
The sped up clip showed Hunnam sitting with his eyes closed as the prosthetics were applied to his left side. Once the prosthetics were dry, the makeup process started. It appeared the prosthetics were airbrushed to match the color of Hunnam’s skin.
“Finding the truth was the whole process,” Hunnam told People about taking on the role. “We were much more interested in why Ed did what he did, rather than exploring what he did. Everybody sort of knows what he did, and it’s been chronicled in many films that he inspired and then direct adaptation to his life.”
Hunnam noted that Gein was “very bizarre” so there were a few steps he took to get into that mindset.
“He’d been abused, he was left in isolation, so he had no real social context to reflect back to him, normal behavior,” he continued. “And he was a very skinny, malnourished type of guy. So I mean, first of all, basically the basic first step was losing 30 pounds so I could look like him.”
Aside from the physical transformation, Hunnam stepped into the mind of Gein as much as he could.
“I read every single book that had been written about him, and there were a lot of books. I read all of the court transcriptions, all of his medical records,” he also told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published earlier this month. ‘And then I read the scripts over and over to understand what would drive a human being to do some of the pretty wild things he did — pretty despicable acts.”
After Gein was arrested for his crimes in 1957, the killer was institutionalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. He eventually stood trial and was convicted on first-degree murder charges. Gein spent the remainder of his life in Wisconsin’s Mendota Mental Health Institute until his death in 1984.
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