“Dahmer – Monsters: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” star Niessie Nash didn’t meet the real Evan Peters until shooting wrapped because her co-star was too engrossed in her serial killer character.
At a Saturday press conference for the hit series, Nash recalled that Peters had to reintroduce himself after a 10-month rehearsal and shooting period, during which he remained in character.
“I respected his need to maintain distance and tension so that it played out on screen,” she said.
Although she didn’t spend time with Peters on set, Nash, who plays Dahmer’s neighbor Glenda Cleveland, kept her in his thoughts.
“I prayed a lot for you, because it’s weighty,” Nash told Peters during a conversation with showrunner Ryan Murphy and co-star Richard Jenkins.
Peters thanked her, recalling a helpful saying that Nash had passed down to her from her grandmother: “Hang hard ’till you’re good enough, and when you’ve had enough, hang hard.”
That mantra stayed with Peters as he prepared for the role by consuming all the books, interviews, footage and psychology reports on Asphalt he could find. To recreate his character’s stern gait, he wore weights on his arm; To sound off, he worked with a speech coach and assembled a 45-minute audio composite he heard every day to mimic his speech patterns and “get into his mindset.”
“I wanted all these extraneous things to be second nature when we were shooting,” Peters explained.
To decompress from his grueling process, the actor watched a lot of rom-coms and comedies like “Step Brothers” and spent time with friends and family in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.
“Evan Peters, you and I in a rom-com right after this,” joked Nash.
“Dahmer” has become the streamer’s second most popular English-language show of all time, following Season 4 of “Stranger Things,” following its September 21 Netflix premiere. As of last week, it has earned 856.2 million total viewing hours.
The fictional account of Dahmer’s life has also raised its fair share of controversy: the family of one of Dahmer’s victims said that the series “re-traumatized” them and that the Murphy never existed before or during the show’s production. did not reach them. Murphy disputed the account, insisting that he had attempted to contact about 20 friends and family members of the victims, but with no success.
At the press conference, Murphy reiterated that “we really did our due diligence” during the 10-year process of making the show.
“We were desperate to get other inputs and so we really relied heavily on multiple sources and many magazine articles, books, etc. We tried to be as true as we could and we tried to interpret the story, ” They said. , “But also we have something to say for sure.”
He further added, “We are not telling the story of a demon again, but [of] How did you become a monster? That was always the DNA of the project. ,
