Evan Peters wanted to ‘play someone normal’ after years of intense roles, but clearly that wasn’t supposed to happen with Jeffrey Dahmer.
After years of intense roles, including a stint on American Horror Story, Evan Peters had really wanted to take a break and ‘play someone normal,’ Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story creator Ryan Murphy has revealed. Clearly, Peters’ desire to tone down the intensity went unfulfilled, since he ended up playing the infamous serial killer in Murphy’s latest.
Discussing the show during a public appearance earlier this week, Murphy reflected on his longstanding relationship with Peters, which dates all the way back to American Horror Story, and remembered how Peters had wanted to ‘play someone normal’ and ‘maybe do a rom-com’ to decompress from the intensity of his roles.
That’s why, he said, that he put off approaching Peters with the script for Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. After auditioning almost over a hundred people, however, he finally brought it up with Peters. Fortunately, the actor responded positively: “He called me the next day, and he said, ‘It’s so challenging. It’s so difficult that I kind of have to say yes to it, even though I’m terrified of it.’”
During the talk, Murphy also addressed the recent criticism directed at the show by the families of Dahmer’s victims, and by his own family members and acquaintances, including claims that they were not contacted during the production process to advise on the development of the show.
Speaking at the event, Murphy refuted the claims, saying that the team behind the show had allegedly reached out to almost 20 families.
“It’s something that we researched for a very long time,” Murphy said. “And we — over the course of the three, three and a half years when we were really writing it, working on it — we reached out to 20, 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.”
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“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.” he added.
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