Charlie Hunnam explains the shocking ending of Monster: The Ed Gein Story - Here's everything to know 

After portraying Jax Teller, the complicated antihero of FX's Sons of Anarchy, Charlie Hunnam plays a real-life serial killer in Ryan Murphy's Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Right from his creepy voice to his chilling mannerisms, the actor adopts the infamous body snatcher's minute details to perfection, bringing nuance and moral complexity to the docuseries' narrative.

After transforming his Plainfield farmhouse into a House of Horrors, Ed Gein is finally arrested in the Monster finale, but a diagnosis instead lands him in a mental asylum.

Both Charlie Hunnam and Ryan Murphy wanted to explore the dilemma between nature and nurture and how it contributed to the formation of this monster. Hunman feels a majority of Ed Gein's actions were fueled by isolation, especially after his mother's death. The actor told Netflix Tudum:

“He was this bizarre guy that lived in his own world, in his own reality, in total isolation with only one other point of contact. And so everything in his life was sort of made up, was a work of his own creation.”

Read on to know how Charlie Hunnam unpacks the Monster: The Ed Gein Story finale with Netflix Tudum.

Charlie Hunnam breaks down Ed Gein's fantasies in Monster: The Ed Gein Story

While the title Monster is up for interpretation in Ryan Murphy's latest anthology, Hunman feels that Ed Gein's fantasies were an important aspect in Monster: The Ed Gein Story. They were the early markers of Ed Gein's harrowing mental condition but unfortunately, he never got the treatment he deserved and drifted towards isolation, which ultimately led him down a tragic path.

Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son), Ed Gein's neighbor and occasional girlfriend, is the only confidante he has throughout the series. All he ever wanted was to be seen and to be loved and Adelaine fulfilled that basic human need for him. However, Charlie Hunnam feels that Adelaine was a figment of Ed Gein's imagination:

“My interpretation was that she’s in a large part a fantasy of Ed’s. He finds, whether in reality or in his mind, this sort of kindred spirit with Adeline, somebody who can relate and to understand these primal urges and instincts that he has.”

Adelaine bleeds into another disturbing fascination for Ed Gein, with Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch. Towards the end of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, he has harrowing visions about Koch, who encourages him to skin his victims and fashion them into furniture.

Charlie Hunnam unpacks the shocking ending of Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Ed Gein's horrific reign came to a shocking halt when he killed Bernice Worden, the local hardware store owner. Bernice's deputy son sees his mother's decapitated body hanging upside down from Gein's barn, which ultimately leads to his arrest. However, the serial killer gets shocking news in Monster: The Ed Gein Story Episode 7, when he is diagnosed with schizophrenia.

For Ryan Murphy and Charlie Hunnam, Monster was never just an exploration of the notorious serial killer's crimes but the circumstances that led to that monstrous transformation. This season was building to this moment in Ed Gein's story, where he finally gets an insight into his horrific actions. In that crucial moment, Monster: The Ed Gein Story subverts the title on its head, exposing society's attitude towards the mentally unwell. Charlie Hunnam, who 'wept inconsolably' after reading that scene in Episode 7, sees Ed Gein's tragic condition almost through an empathetic lens:

“He really lived in that world, and the parameters and fantasies of that world were as real to him as anything else. It was just his reality. Those manic episodes were the experience he was having, just like anything else.”

If anything, Ed Gein carries his schizophrenia right until the Monster: The Ed Gein Story finale, where he envisions a sea of serial killers ushering him into a long hallway, praising and calling him their role model.

The finale suggests that while he was receiving fan mail and the pop culture was starting to get obsessed with him, he was beginning a delusional journey, smiling softly at the dark legacy he leaves behind. Allusions to real-life killers like Ted Bundy & Richard Speck and Ed Gein's fictional counterparts like Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, and Leatherface in the finale were 'haunting proceedings' to portray his influence in fiction and reality alike.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is streaming on Netflix.

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