Per THR, Hunnam reacted to the criticism the season has received, particularly with regards to the liberties taken with much of the storyline, and some of the victims. Hunnam revealed that he doesn’t agree that the show glamorizes murder, and praised the season as being “sensationally good.” Check out Hunnam’s comments below:
Charlie Hunnam: I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could.
He continued by questioning whether Ed Gein is the true monster of the show, or whether it’s the filmmakers who exploited his murders to make movies, or the audience for watching and enjoying it.
Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and went and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process? Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?
Co-creator Ian Brennan also defended the show, claiming the intent is not to be exploitative, and that it’s important to tell the whole story, however disturbing. He also opined that Ed Gein is a story of mental illness.
Ian Brennan: This show is always trying to not be exploitative. It’s trying to actually show that you can pull back too much when you’re telling a macabre story. It’s important that you tell the whole story even with the parts that are hard to watch. I don’t think this season’s sensational at all. I think it’s sensationally good, but it’s a real deep dive into a very strange and important touchstone of the 20th century. It just happened to be this very lonely, strange, mentally ill man in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin who had this enormous cultural footprint that changed pop culture. Ed at its core is a story of mental illness.
Brennan continued by stating that it was important for the show to focus on the horror of his inner life, and the fact Gein’s brain worked differently.
It was as important for us to show the horror of his inner life and his sort of prison that his brain was trapped in to show that horror as it was about this or that kill, per se … Ed Gein had a different brain, and he wasn’t able to have the perspective to look at something and put it away in a compartment. He saw images and was obsessed with that. He saw things that his brain couldn’t unsee. It started with all the stuff that came out of the Holocaust, which Vicky’s [Krieps] character portrays so brilliantly, just the horrors of the banality of what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. And he couldn’t get it out of his head. This is the [season] that looks at the question most squarely of what happens when you see horrific things.
Concluding, he talked about how the fourth-wall breaking is an attempt to turn the camera on the creators, as well as the audience, for showing and watching something they perhaps shouldn’t be watching.
[The fourth-wall-breaking scene is] also a way for us to turn the camera on ourselves to be like, “No, we’re aware that we’re also doing the thing of showing something that maybe you shouldn’t be looking at” … Psycho was Albert Hitchcock topping what had come before it. And then Texas Chainsaw Massacre was Tobe Hooper topping what Hitchcock had done. And so it’s this process of having to continually out scare ourselves. And I think we wanted to really probe that question of: Is this what people should be watching?
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