Although Evan Peters and Ryan Murphy have worked together for years, Peters was “terrified” to take on Netflix’s “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”
“I really went back and forth on whether I should do it or not. I knew it was going to be incredibly dark and an incredible challenge,” Peters said during a panel Saturday with Murphy and co-stars Niecy Nash and Richard Jenkins. When he was sent the scripts, he watched Dahmer’s 1994 interview on “Dateline” in order to “dive into the psychology of that extreme side of human behavior.”
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During the four months of prep and six months of shooting, Murphy noted that Peters wore lead weights around his arms and lifts in his shoes to get Dahmer’s physicality down and “basically stayed in this character, as difficult as it was, for months.”
“He 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,” Evans explained. “I wanted all this stuff, these external things, to be second nature when we were shooting, so I watched a lot of footage and 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.”
Nash added that she cheerfully approached Peters at the beginning of filming to say hello and realized he was “in his process.”
“I wanted to respect that and I wanted to keep him there,” she said, turning to Peters. “I prayed for you a lot, for real, because this is weighty. And when you stay in it, and you’re tethered to the material, like bone to marrow, your soul is troubled at some point. And I could see him getting tired. I just said, ‘Well, I’m just gonna make sure I keep him in my prayers, because this is a lot and he wants to do it justice.’”
There has been some backlash around the series, with allegations that Murphy didn’t contact the family members and friends of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims — something he shot down Thursday during a DGA event.
“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.”
“Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is now streaming on Netflix.
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