Evan Peters has been opening up on what it took to play Jeffrey Dahmer in the hit Netflix miniseries, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
The 35-year-old lead star appeared during a Q+A panel for the true crime series where he spoke about his role as the American serial killer who murdered 17 boys and men between 1978 and 1991.
During the discussion, the American Horror Story actor shared that he into extreme lengths to ensure he was able to embody the killer for the record-breaking show which was watched 701.37 million hours within three weeks of its release, per Daily Mail.
Peters disclosed that he not only wore Milwaukee Cannibal's clothes ahead of filming, but his accessories too, including his glasses, shoes, and jeans for months.
In quotes obtained by Variety, Peters said during a panel with Ryan Murphy and co-stars Niecy Nash and Richard Jenkins that he went "back and forth" on whether he should take on the role because he "knew it was going to be incredibly dark".
The Kick-Ass actor explained that when he was sent the scripts, he watched the killer's 1994 interview on Dateline so that he could "dive into the psychology of that extreme side of human behavior".
The director chimed in and said that during the four months of prep and six months of shooting for the project, Peters "stayed in character" for months by wearing weights around his arms and lifts in his shoes to imitate Dahmer's physical body.
"He has a very straight back. He doesn’t move his arms when he walks, so I put weights on my arms to see what that felt like. I wore the character shoes with lifts in them, his jeans, his glasses, I had a cigarette in my hand at all times," Peters said.
"I wanted all this stuff, these external things, to be second nature when we were shooting, so I watched a lot of footage and I also worked with a dialect coach to get down his voice. The way that he spoke, was very distinct and he had a dialect," he continued.
"So, I also went off and created this 45-minute audio composite, which was very helpful," he said. "I listened to that every day, in hopes of learning his speech patterns, but really, in an attempt to try to get into his mindset and understand that each day that we were shooting."
The Mare of Easttown actor described the filming process as "an exhaustive search" as he tried to find "private" moments when the killer "didn’t seem self-conscious," so he could understand how Dahmer behaved before his interviews and his time in prison.
Nash, who plays Dahmer’s neighbor Glenda Cleveland, added that she wanted to "respect" Peters' preparation for the show and "prayed a lot" for him.
"I wanted to respect that and I wanted to keep him there. I prayed for you a lot, for real, because this is weighty. And when you stay in it, and you’re tethered to the material, like a bone to marrow, your soul is troubled at some point," she said.
The series, which is the second most-viewed English Netflix show of all time, received criticism on social media and from surviving members of victims' families, who claimed that they weren't consulted before production began.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Murphy responded to those claims and said that he researched "for a very long time," and allegedly contacted 20 family members for their input, but didn't hear anything back.
"We relied very, very heavily on our incredible group of researchers who… I don’t even know how they found a lot of this stuff. But it was just like a night-and-day effort to us trying to uncover the truth of these people," he shared.