Monster season 3 officially sets new killer subject and leading star

Ahead of the highly anticipated return of Ryan Murphy's Monster anthology series, Netflix already has season 3 on the brain. On Sept. 16, the streamer announced that Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam will lead Monster season 3 as serial killer Ed Gein. Murphy shared the exciting news of Hunnam's casting and season 3's subject during the Monsters season 2 premiere.

According to Netflix's press release about the casting and new serial killer subject, Monster season 3 will begin production "next month," which puts the show on pace for an October 2024 filming start. Additional information about the upcoming third season will surely arrive once cameras start rolling, including more cast additions and a more detailed looked at what to expect from the season.

The first season of Monster, which centered on Jeffrey Dahmer and starred Evan Peters, was a huge success for Netflix, becoming a viewership hit and and an Emmy Award winner in spite of the controversy surrounding its release in September 2022. The show's breakout success inspired Netflix to order two more seasons in November 2022, turning the series into an anthology.

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story makes its premiere on Netflix on Sept. 19, almost exactly two years following the initial premiere of the series. The season stars Nicholas Chavez and Cooper Koch as the Menendez brothers and Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny as their parents, Jose and Kitty. Monsters season 2 examines the brothers' killing of their parents and asks who the monsters really were in the tragic true crime story that gripped the nation.

The upcoming third season of Monster marks Hunnam's first collaboration with Murphy, as the prolific producer tends to work with a recurring group of actors. Following the conclusion of his role on Sons of Anarchy in 2014, Hunnam appeared in the series Shantaram on Apple TV+ and will next be seen in the Amazon Prime Video series Criminal. He also appeared in the first part of last year's Netflix original movie two-parter Rebel Moon.

In the weeks leading up to the release of Monsters season 2, reports suggested that season 3 could possibly focus on John Wayne Gacy, but now with the official report coming from Netflix and Ryan Murphy himself, we know that speculation to not be true (though any potential future seasons could tackle that particular serial killer story).

Ed Gein, who will inspire the next season of Monster, was also known as the Butcher of Plainfield and confessed to killing two women in the 1950s: Mary Hogan and Bernice Warden. Gein was also known to steal bodies from graveyards. There are other haunting aspects of his story that will make for another controversial, graphic, and downright disturbing season of Monster. For now, we can expect Hunnam to make his debut as Gein when Netflix releases the season sometime in 2025.

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