Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, and Laurie Metcalf have joined the cast of Netflix’s Monster, ahead of the controversial crime drama’s third season. The trio will share the screen with Charlie Hunnam, whose involvement was announced in September.
While we already know the next chapter of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s show will center on real-life killer Ed Gein, who gained notoriety in the late 1950s after he was caught digging up bodies from local graveyards and confessed to murdering two women, the new additions shed more light on which direction it might take…
As confirmed by the streamer, Hollander, who’s perhaps best known for The Night Manager, The White Lotus and his appearances in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, will play Alfred Hitchcock. Gein was reportedly a major inspiration for author Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho in 1959, and subsequently Hitchcock’s interpretation of Norman Bates in his adaptation a year later. Could this mean the series will concentrate more on Gein’s influence in American pop culture, rather than his crimes and capture?
Williams (Dune: Prophecy) is set to bring Hitchcock’ wife Alma to life, while Metcalf (Scream 2) has signed on as Gein’s religious mother Augusta Wilhelmine Gein.
Released on September 19, Monster’s previous installment chronicles the real-life case of brothers Erik and Lyle Menendez, who were convicted of fatally shooting their parents in Beverly Hills in 1989. During their trial, the prosecution argued that they were seeking to inherit their family’s fortune, while the siblings claimed – as they still do to this day – that they killed their parents in self-defense, following years of emotional and sexual abuse. They were subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.
Starring Nicholas Alexander Chavez, Cooper Koch, Chloë Sevigny, and Javier Bardem, the series was met with mixed reviews, many of which criticized the way it fictionalizes certain events for shock value, the inclusion of the parents’ POV, and its implication that the Menendez brothers were incestuous.
“It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward – back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women,” Lyle Menendez said in a statement, via his wife Tammi’s social media account, shortly after the show dropped.
“Those awful lies have been disrupted and exposed by countless brave victims over the last two decades who have broken through their personal shame and bravely spoken out.”
Despite the controversy surrounding the show, The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story reached the #1 spot on Netflix’s top TV chart. It’s streaming now, along with Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. For more, check out our list of the best Netflix shows for some viewing recommendations.
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