Playing Real Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer Wasn’t Easy For Evan Peters, but critics and viewers say the actor has done an incredible job. While the series, called Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, has not been undisputed, it seemed that everyone agreed that Peters did a phenomenal job with the role. But getting there was something that Peters previously described as scary, and now the actor has opened up a lot more to all the efforts he’d made to transform himself into Dahmer.
Per Variety, Peters attended a panel on Saturday for the series with co-creator Ryan Murphy and co-stars Niecy Nash and Richard Jenkins. He explained how he was initially afraid to take on the role, noting that he “knew it was going to be incredibly dark and an incredible challenge.” After getting the scripts, Peters dove into months of research, starting with watching the famous 1994 television interview with Dahmer. Murphy also said that Peters wore lead weights around his arms, along with elevators in his shoes to more closely mimic the way the serial killer moved.
“He basically stayed in this character for months, difficult as it was,” Murphy said.
“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 felt,” clarified Peters. “I wore the character shoes with elevators in them, his jeans, his glasses, I always had a cigarette in my hand. I wanted all these things, these outward things, to be second nature when we were shooting, so I watched a lot of images.”
When he got the right voice, he added: “I also worked with a dialect coach to soften his voice. The way he spoke was very clear and he had a dialect. So I also went out and made this 45 minute audio composite, which was really helpful, I listened to that every day, hoping to learn his speech patterns, but really, trying to get into his mindset and understand that every day we were recording. was an exhausting search, trying to find private moments, times when he didn’t seem self-conscious, so you could get a glimpse of how he behaved prior to these interviews and his imprisonment.”
Evan Peters did extensive research for Dahmer
In the series, Niecy Nash plays a neighbor of Dahmer’s whose cries for help were ignored by the police. Nash says she never really got to know Peters while they were filming because he was so ingrained in his monstrous nature. Noticing that Peters was so deep into the role, Nash kept her distance as she prayed for him to overcome the demons that come with such a dark mindset.
“I really prayed for you because this is tough,” Nash said. ‘And if you stay in it, and you’re tied to the material, like bone to marrow, your soul is at some point troubled. And I saw that he was getting tired. I just said, ‘Well, I’m just going to make sure I keep him in my prayers because this is a lot and he wants to do it justice.'”
Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story streaming on Netflix.