What to Know
Apparently, dating an actor can come with some pretty unexpected consequences. There are some obvious downsides, like being thrust into the spotlight. But what Charlie Hunnam’s girlfriend has been dealing with is something else entirely: her partner would not stop talking like a convicted murderer.
The actor portrays serial killer Ed Gein in Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Clearly taking this role seriously, Charlie started speaking like the infamous killer, to the point that he even spoke that way at home sometimes. Understandably, his longtime partner, Morgana McNelis, did not approve. Can you blame her?
Charlie’s girlfriend had to ask him to stop talking like that.
At the 2026 Critics Choice Awards, Charlie told E! News that he started using his Ed Gein voice “around the house” at the time of filming, and his partner had to ask him to stop. “I was slipping in and out of it all the time,” he admitted. “And she would say, ‘Dude, you have to stop at the voice.'” He added, “At breakfast, it’s a little too much.”
Interestingly, after Charlie took on this particular role, he regretted it at first, thinking it might be too “dark” for him.
He told Entertainment Weekly, “Once I said yes to this, I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. I started researching it, reading all the books about Ed Gein, and I fell into a full panic. I just thought there might be no coming back from this. This is so dark, to inhabit this character.”
Once he read the scripts, his perspective shifted.
Though he wasn’t exactly super eager about his creepy new role, reading the script made him realize that the focus of the story was actually “why he did what he did and trying to find the human being behind the monster.”
Still, this was not easy for him. Overall, he told the publication that working on the series “was a really beautiful experience” in some ways. However, he added that it was “definitely dark at times too,” meaning that “there was times when we thought, ‘How are we gonna get through the day?'”
He also explained his initial uncertainty about the project when speaking to E! News. When he first took the role, he didn’t have access to the scripts. “All I had to go upon when I started working were all of the texts that have been written about him,” he explained. “They were just this litany of this sensationalist horror show of all of the things that he did, which were undoubtedly terrible.”
Charlie continued, “But there was a human being in there, a mixed-up, mentally ill, abused, isolated man inside there that was driving all of that. So it took a while to get past what he did, to be able to find who he was inside and why he was doing what he was doing.”
