"I knew it was going to be incredibly dark": Evan Peters opens up on intense method acting prep to get into the skin of Jeffrey Dahmer

American actor Evan Peters opened up about how he prepped for his role as serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer for the Netflix series.

According to Variety, the 35-year-old actor, along with his co-stars Niecy Nash and Richard Jenkins and show creator Ryan Murphy, appeared on a panel on October 29, where he revealed that he was "terrified" to take on the role of Dahmer.

“I really went back and forth on whether I should do it or not. I knew it was going to be incredibly dark and an incredible challenge.”

During the panel, Ryan Murphy revealed that Evan Peters stayed in his famed character "for months," and adopted intense acting methods during that time, which included four months of preparation for the role and six months of filming the series.

To get into the skin on Jeffrey Dahmer, Evan Peters wore lead weights around his arms and lifts in his shoes to encapsulate the serial killer's physical appearance.

"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."

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Evan Peters hired a dialect coach to ace his portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer

While describing his behind-the-scenes procedure, Evan Peters revealed that he watched several videos of Jeffrey Dahmer for it to become his "second nature," and even hired a dialect coach "to get down his voice."

"The way that he spoke, it was very distinct and he had a dialect. So I also went off and created this 45-minute audio composite, which was very helpful. 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."

Evan Peters said that researching Dahmer was "exhaustive" since it was tough to find videos where the serial killer was not self-conscious in order to understand his behavior before going to prison and being in a negative light.

Ryan Murphy also responded to allegations that he did not approach the families of Dahmer's victims before creating the series.

“We, over the course of the three-and-a-half years when we were really writing it, working on it, we reached out to 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.”

Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was released on Netflix on September 21, 2022. The series consists of 10 episodes that show a dramatized version of Dahmer's early life and gruesome murders from the victim's point of view.