‘Lizzie Borden’ Cast on Treating the Story as a Comedy, the Joy of Playing a Sadistic Character and Finding Empathy for a Bloody Monster: ‘I Understand This Person’

“Don’t you worry: I look after my axes,” Charlie Hunnam says proudly with an impish grin.

At the moment, he’s not in character but rather marveling at a hobby he picked up before filming “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.” In it, he plays Lizzie’s father, an undertaker who is fine chopping a client’s legs off if they are too tall for the coffin.

Hunnam himself says that in the months leading up to filming, he’d been noticing felled trees on the side of the road while driving through Los Angeles. He took to chopping them up and throwing them into the back of his pickup truck.

“I ended up with probably about 10 tons of wood and bought some great axes and started becoming quite the axeman,” he says. “I’ve been really, really wanting these beautiful Scandinavian axes. When I got this, because Andrew Borden’s an ax collector, I said, ‘Well, it’s for the work. I’ve got to have these axes.’”

The conversation mirrors the surprising, irreverent tone of this season of “Monster.” A complete turn from the darkness of “The Ed Gein Story,” in which Hunnam starred as the titular killer, there is a lightness, beauty and levity to…

Original source: https://variety.com/v/tv/