Ryan Murphy‘s true-crime anthology Monster has tackled some of history’s most notorious killers, but one dark mafia story won’t be making the cut anytime soon.
Ryan Murphy Shut Down Charles Hunnam’s Pitch
While promoting his role as Andrew Borden in Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Charlie Hunnam revealed that he tried to pitch an idea for a future installment directly to Murphy. Hunnam set his sights on Roy DeMeo, an infamous Gambino crime family captain who ran a lethal crew out of Brooklyn’s Gemini Lounge during the 1970s and 1980s.
For Hunnam, the appeal lay in the twisted psychology dividing underworld duty from outright psychopathy.
“I pitched it to Ryan, he wasn’t interested,” Hunnam admitted. “I thought the Roy DeMeo [story]… he was a captain of the Gambino family, but he became a serial killer. And I thought there was something interesting about exploring sort of like sanctioned murder within the mafia—and what was seen as sort of honorable and courageous… versus like murder for pleasure, or for some sort of darker psychological impulse.”
Despite DeMeo being linked to scores of brutal killings that blurred the boundary between mob hits and recreational butchery, Murphy shut the pitch down without hesitation.
“I thought there was something interesting there to explore, and Ryan went, ‘Yeah, I’m not interested,'” Hunnam shared with a laugh. “I went, ‘All right, well’.”
With Murphy passing on the mob underworld, the anthology continues to look elsewhere across true-crime history, leaving DeMeo’s grim legacy off the table for now.
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