'Not a single person responded': Ryan Murphy reached out to 20 families and friends of Jeffrey Dahmer victims
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Ryan Murphy, the showrunner of Netflix's 'Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story', recently spoke about how his team had reached out to the families and friends of 20 victims of the serial killer during the making of the show to verify their research but nobody showed interest in speaking to them.
At a recent promotional event at the DGA Theatre in Los Angeles, Murphy was vocal about how his team pulled off extraordinary research to accumulate information about the serial killer’s activities. He also mentioned that the whole research, verification and creation of the show took a good 3 and half years to complete.
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“It’s something that we researched for a very long time,” Murphy said, “And we, over the course of the three, three and a half years when we were really writing it, working on it, we reached out to 20, around 20 of the victims’ families and friends trying to get input, trying to talk to people and not a single person responded to us in that process. So 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.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Murphy and Paris Barclay, a director on the show, had previously talked about how the show wanted to focus on making the victims more than just another piece of news for people to talk about in passing.
“Something that we talked a lot in the making of it is we weren’t so much interested in Jeffrey Dahmer, the person, but what made him the monster that he became,” Murphy said. “We talked a lot about that… and we talked about it all the time. It’s really about white privilege. It’s about systemic racism. It’s about homophobia.”
“We really want it to be about celebrating these victims,” Barclay added. “When Tony writes ‘I won’t disappear’ on that last card, that’s what this show is about. It’s about making sure these people are not erased by history and that they have a place and that they’re recognized and that they were important and that they lived full lives. And they came from all sorts of different places, but they were real people.”
He continued, “They weren’t just numbers. They weren’t just pictures on billboards and telephone poles. They were real people with loving families, breathing, living, hoping. That’s what we wanted it to be about.”