NEED TO KNOW
- Anthony Perkins’ son, director Osgood Perkins spoke out about Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which depicts his dad onscreen
- Osgood explained why he “he “wouldn’t watch it with a 10-foot pole”
- Serial killer Ed Gein is said to have inspired the Psycho character Norman Bates, whom Anthony famously played in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film
Osgood Perkins won’t be among the millions to tune into Ryan Murphy’s controversial Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
The director, known for horror movies like Longlegs and The Monkey, spoke out about the series that’s based on serial killer Gein, who inspired the character Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho. Osgood’s dad, actor Anthony Perkins, played that iconic role and is portrayed in the Monster series by Joey Pollari.
Osgood, 51, told TMZ he refuses to sit through the show, saying he “wouldn’t watch it with a 10-foot pole.”
The filmmaker told the outlet he takes issue with projects that try to inject “glamorous and meaningful content” into true-crime stories, adding that it’s “increasingly devoid of context and that the Netflix-ization of real pain [i.e. the authentic human experiences wrought by ‘actual events’] is playing for the wrong team.”
Joey Pollari as Anthony Perkins in “Monster: The Ed Gein Story”.
Courtesy Of Netflix
Oscar nominee Anthony, also known for other movies like 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express, died from AIDS-related complications in 1992 at age 60. He had two sons, Osgood and Elvis, with wife Berry Berenson.
Osgood previously told PEOPLE about continuing his dad’s horror-movie legacy and recalled how he “grew up in a household with a very famous, visible father who was living two lives, at least, and was a closeted homosexual or bisexual man.”
“My father was an actor who had sort of a private life that was not acceptable in the mainstream, whether you want to call him a gay man or a bisexual man, whatever moniker we want to put on that,” said Osgood, whose next film, Keeper, is in theaters Nov. 14. “You couldn’t do that, you couldn’t be both. You still can’t.”
Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in ‘Psycho’ (1960).
Screen Archives/Getty
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Infamous killer Gein, who died in 1984, is said to have inspired fictional works like Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
In the series produced by Murphy, Gein is played by Charlie Hunnam, and the cast also includes Laurie Metcalf, Vicky Krieps, Suzanna Son and Tom Hollander, who portrays Hitchcock.
Previous installments of Murphy’s Monster series have focussed on killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, and an upcoming season will center on Lizzie Borden.
Hunnam, 45, defended his iteration of the anthology series, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “If people are compelled to talk about it and think about it, hopefully they’ll actually be compelled to watch the show. What I would hope and feel really confident in is that it was a very sincere exploration of the human condition and why this boy did what he did.”
