Although Evan Peters and Ryan Murphy have worked together for years, Peters was “terrified” about taking on Netflix’s Dahmer: Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
“I’ve really been debating whether to do it or not. I knew it was going to be incredibly dark and incredibly challenging,” Peters said during a Saturday panel discussion with Murphy and co-stars Niecy Nash and Richard Jenkins. When the scripts were sent to him, he watched Dahmer’s 1994 interview on Dateline to “dive into the psychology of this extreme side of human behavior.”
During the four months of preparation and six months of filming, Murphy noted that Peters wore lead weights around his arms and elevators in his shoes to reduce Dahmer’s physicality and “basically stayed in that character for months, difficult as it was.” “.
“He has a very straight back. He doesn’t move his arms when he walks, so I put weights on my arms to see how that feels. I wore the character’s shoes with elevators, his jeans, his glasses, I always had a cigarette in my hand,” Evans explained. “I wanted all of these things, these external things, to be second nature during the shoot, so I looked at a lot of footage and also worked with a dialect coach to get his voice down. The way he spoke was very clear and he had a dialect. So I went out and made this 45 minute audio composite which was very helpful. I listened to this every day, hoping to learn his speech patterns, but really to try to get into his mindset and understand that we were shooting every day. It was an exhaustive search trying to find private moments, times when he didn’t seem confident, so you can get a sense of how he was acting prior to these interviews and in prison.”
Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer. COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Nash added that as filming began, she cheerfully reached out to Peters to say hello, realizing he was “in his process.”
“I wanted to respect that and I wanted to keep him there,” she said, turning to Peters. “I’ve really prayed a lot for you, because this is important. And if you stay inside, tied to the material like bones to marrow, your soul will eventually become troubled. And I could see that he was getting tired. I just said, ‘Well I’m just going to make sure I put him in my prayers because that’s a lot and he wants to live up to it.’”
There was some backlash on the series with allegations that Murphy failed to contact the family members and friends of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims – something he shot down during a DGA event on Thursday.
“It’s something we’ve been researching for a very long time,” the author said. “We reached out to around 20 victims’ families and friends for input and to speak to people over the course of the three and a half years that we really wrote and worked on it. And not a single person answered us in this process. So we relied very, very heavily on our incredible group of researchers who… I don’t even know how they found so much of this stuff. But it has been like a day and night effort for us to uncover the truth about these people.”
Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is now streaming on Netflix.