It sounds like Evan Peters went some way to embody the pure evil of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Netflix's Monster, or at least as far as you can go without killing somebody.
That's according to showrunner Ryan Murphy, at least, who has worked with Peters several times in the past — not least on umpteen seasons of grim anthology horror show American Horror Story. He “basically stayed in this character, as difficult as it was, for months,” Murphy noted during a panel over the weekend (h/t Variety). For one, Peters wore lead weights around his arms and in his shoes to nail Dahmer's physical heft, enduring them across four months of preparation and six months of shooting.
Peters offered a little more context as to why he went the Method-y mile for the series. “[Dahmer] has a very straight back. He doesn't move his arms when he walks, so I put weights in my arms to see what that felt like,” he said. “I wore the character shoes with lifts in them, his jeans, his glasses, I had a cigarette in my hands at all times.”
He worked tirelessly on the “external things” — the specific intonations of Dahmer's voice, his unique dialect — an “exhaustive search” in service of finding Dahmer's interiority, though Peters did concede that the serial killer “didn't seem self conscious". No kidding. “I created this 45-minute audio composite [of Dahmer's voice], which was very helpful,” he said. “I listened to that every day, in hopes of learning his speech patterns, but really, in an attempt to try to get into his mindset and understand [it] each day that we were shooting." Sounds like a veritable horror story in and of itself.
Though one of Netflix's biggest hits this year, the series has come under fire following the revelation that Murphy did not consult any of the victim's families before making it, including some subjects who actually make it on the show by way of dramatised court proceedings. “It's something we researched for a very long time,” Murphy said during a Director's Guild of America event last week, defending the ethical charge against him.
“We reached out to around twenty of the victims' families and friends trying to get input […] not a single person responded to us in that process," he said. We wonder why?
Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is now streaming on Netflix.
