Plus, she opens up about how one “ballsy” improvised scene illustrates the “collaborative and weirdly fun environment on set” of the Netflix show.

Laurie Metcalf on what she learned from a surprising career first in Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Plus, she opens up about how one "ballsy" improvised scene illustrates the "collaborative and weirdly fun environment on set" of the Netflix show.

By Lauren Huff

Lauren Huff

Lauren Huff is an award-winning journalist and staff writer at ** with over 12 years of experience covering all facets of the entertainment industry.

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December 21, 2025 10:00 a.m. ET

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Laurie Metcalf on 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story'. Credit:

Courtesy Of Netflix

*Monster: The Ed Gein Story* marks a career milestone for star Laurie Metcalf: It was the first time she agreed to a project without having read a single script.

The Emmy-winning star of *Roseanne* and its spinoff, *The Conners*, admits that this isn’t her “preferred way” of doing things, but she was intrigued by series co-creator Ryan Murphy’s vision for the story and her character, Augusta, the domineering, psychologically abusive, hyper-religious mother of infamous killer and body snatcher Ed Gein (Charlie Hunnam).

Once she was signed on, the challenge for Metcalf and Hunnam became conjuring a mother-son relationship that “wasn’t totally lopsided.” Meaning “there had to be a reason for Augusta’s type of discipline for him, and this type of religious education,” says the *Lady Bird* Oscar nominee, “that all of this stuff came not from out of nowhere, but out of a sense of protection of him, and guidance to put him on the right path.”

Charlie Hunnam and Laurie Metcalf on 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story'.

Their “mission,” as she puts it, was to find “little seeds of, even tenderness.” "I think that was our main concern, because the other stuff was already there, the overbearingness and the just dysfunction — that's all clear," Metcalf says.**

Despite the admittedly grim subject matter, none of the intense scenes felt too daunting because of the “collaborative and weirdly fun environment on set,” says Metcalf. To illustrate the point, the star recalls an unscripted scene that director and co-showrunner Max Winkler came up with towards the end of the show's shoot.

"It was me, my character, chasing Charlie around the house, and we were giggling and laughing, just playing tag inside the house," she explains. "And if he had come up with that idea during the first week of the shoot, I wouldn't have known what to make of it, but by the end, it made so much weird sense to me that these two in their dysfunctional relationship would have a moment like that. It just seemed to say a lot about both of them and was so unexpected."

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In fact, Metcalf says she "ended up falling in love" with the scene, which they ended up having to do several takes of. "It was so seemingly ridiculous, but I thought it was so interesting and creative," she says, adding, "that was an unexpected couple of hours that we spent towards the end of a long shoot that I just got such a kick out of, and I admired how ballsy it was for him to ask us to do that."

And, it turns out, signing up for a show sans scripts had a surprising lasting impact on the veteran actress of stage and screen: “I learned that it’s okay to take a leap of faith like that and know that you’re going to be surrounded by really great people who were doing the same thing. I think it made me a little bolder. It made me a little less risk-averse. I wanted to explore whatever this was going to be, starting from scratch, with everybody else.”

*A version of this story appears in a special Awardist 2026 Kickoff print edition.***

Original Article on Source

Source: “EW Miniseries”