Evan Peters 'spent months' method acting as Jeffrey Dahmer, Ryan Murphy reveals
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This article contains discussion of murder and sexual assault some may find upsetting.
DAHMER - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story producer Ryan Murphy has revealed actor Evan Peters spent "months" method acting as Jeffrey Dahmer in order to prepare for the role.
Last month, Netflix released a dramatisation of the true crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as the'Milwaukee Cannibal', who was responsible for the murder of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. His sickening crimes involved dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism, with the Netflix dramatisation illustrating the heinous methods he used during the murders.
While the 10-part series quickly became one of the streaming services' most watched shows ever, it also received a lot of backlash, with many viewers criticising The Jeffrey Dahmer Story for "retraumatising victims' families".
Now, Ryan Murphy has shared more details about the show, revealing Evan Peters was method acting, where you stay in character even when the cameras aren't rolling, in prep for the role.
Murphy explained during a Q&A on Saturday (via Variety) that Peters "basically stayed in this character, as difficult as it was, for months", wearing weights around his arms and lifts in his shoes.
It was "four months of prep, six months of shooting," Evans continued. "[Dahmer] has a very straight back. He doesn’t move his arms when he walks, so I put weights on my arms to see what that felt like. I wore the character shoes with lifts in them, his jeans, his glasses, I had a cigarette in my hand at all times."
He watched a lot of footage of the real Dahmer, so it was "second nature when we were shooting.. I also worked with a dialect coach to get down his voice. The way that he spoke, it was very distinct and he had a dialect. So I also went off and created this 45-minute audio composite, which was very helpful.
"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 that each day that we were shooting. It was an exhaustive search, trying to find private moments, times where he didn’t seem self conscious, so you could get a glimpse into how he behaved prior to these interviews and being in prison.”
Ryan Murphy also responded to backlash the show has received, insisting they tried to create a story as close to reality as they could. "It’s something that we researched for a very long time,” the writer said. "We, over the course of the three-and-a-half years when we were really writing it, working on it, we reached out to around 20 of the victims’ families and friends trying to get input, trying to talk to people. And not a single person responded to us in that process.
"So we relied very, very heavily on our incredible group of researchers who… I don’t even know how they found a lot of this stuff. But it was just like a night-and-day effort to us trying to uncover the truth of these people."
The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is now streaming on Netflix.
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