The Real Reason Charlie Hunnam Sounds Different in Monster: The Ed Gein Story
The signature voice audiences know wasn’t born onstage—it was forged in research. Years in the archives honed it into a cadence that now commands rooms.
Charlie Hunnam went down a pretty weird rabbit hole to find Ed Gein's voice for Netflix's latest Monster chapter, and honestly, it shows. With almost no real audio of Gein to work from, he built the accent from scratch — using psychology, a lot of research, and a three-hour Ryan Murphy brain-dump that sounds like it came with footnotes.
Building a voice for someone we barely have on tape
Hunnam — yes, the guy from Sons of Anarchy and The Gentlemen — plays Ed Gein in Monster: The Ed Gein Story. The big problem: there was basically nothing to mimic. The only known recording of Gein surfaced right before cameras rolled, so he had to invent a voice without hearing the man he was playing.
So he built it from what he learned about Gein's home life. Gein's entire world was his mother, and according to Hunnam, she told him every day for 41 years that she hated him because he was not the daughter she wanted. If that is your only human connection, what does that do to your body and your voice? Hunnam decided it would show up as something soft and high in pitch — a sound designed to earn approval he never got.
'I thought this gentle, high-pitched voice might be a way that Ed gave permission to his mother to love him.'
Dark? Yes. Inside-baseball? Also yes. But that is how he arrived at the character's unusual cadence.
The Ryan Murphy marathon
Hunnam says he did not know much about Gein before taking the role. That changed fast thanks to a marathon meeting with Monster director Ryan Murphy. He thought it was a general get-to-know-you, then Murphy showed up 10 minutes late (very apologetic), explained he had been writing all day and lost track of time in the creative splendour of breaking the story, and proceeded to unload.
Hunnam describes the three-hour debrief as basically like watching a documentary in real time — the kind where, in two hours, you suddenly feel like you have the character mapped. He calls Murphy passionately obsessed with storytelling and the process, and says the download did a fantastic job grounding him in the real-life material.
Quick context, because this story is not nothing
Ed Gein is the 1950s American killer whose crimes — murdering at least two women and digging up bodies from local graves — inspired decades of horror. Monster: The Ed Gein Story is the latest instalment of Netflix's anthology series, and Hunnam's approach here is all about what made Gein tick rather than copying a voice that barely exists on record.