Here’s What Ed Gein’s Voice Really Sounds Like After Monster‘s Charlie Hannam Was Accused of Using a ‘Ridiculous’ Accent for the Role
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Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology series is known to make real-life events more exaggerated. But a lot of people who have watched the third season, that’s focused on Ed Gein, might notice one detail that might not stick with the facts.
Ed Gein was arrested after he was suspected of killing two women in Plainfield, Wisconsin. Investigators later found multiple mutilated bodies of women in his household that were used as everyday objects. His abusive mother was attributed to the motive of the murders, as it was reported that he would find bodies of women who reminded him of his deceased mother and preserve parts of them both “to bring her back to life and have her with him always, and to destroy her as the cause of his frustration,” according to TIME.
Growing up, Gein was raised by his mother and took care of her until her death when he was in his 40s. The relationship inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film Psycho. But did this relationship really affect his voice.
What did Ed Gein’s voice sound like?
Several YouTube videos have exhibited Ed Gein’s interrogation video that was featured in the MGM+ documentary Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein. In the audio, he’s asked about what he’s done to the bodies of his victims.
Some fans of the Monster anthology wrote comments about how the voice compares to the actor’s, mostly saying that Hannam’s voice was unnecessary. “Just started watching the show. Came here to see if the voice matched, and now I’m not sure I can continue watching it. His voice is ridiculous on the show. No one talks like that!” one person wrote.
Charlie Hannam, who plays Ed Gein in the show, told the Radio Times, “There were no videos of Ed. There was one tape that was very obscure and was never released. He never stood trial because he was deemed medically unfit because of his psychological orders. They never read his Miranda Rights, and he was beaten up while he was in jail. These tapes were put in a drawer and never put out in the world.
“I only found them three or four days before the shoot. That voice grew out of my research. The thing I couldn’t stop thinking of Ed’s burning desire to get the love and acceptance from his mother that he never got.”
“It was an affectation, it was what Ed thought that his mother wanted him to be,” Hunnam elaborated to Netflix’s Tudum. “It wasn’t an authentic voice that lived in him. It was this persona, it was this character that he was playing because his mother desperately wanted a daughter, and she was given a son. In her more hostile, vile moments, she would tell him, ‘I should have castrated you at birth.’ ”
