Charlie Hunnam has admitted the stutter he gave Andrew Borden in Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is entirely his own creation.
Hunnam, 44, told CBR that nothing in the historical record suggests the real 1892 murder victim had any speech impediment. The British actor plays the slain Massachusetts father in the fourth season of Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology, which premiered all eight episodes on September 17.
“That’s not historically accurate,” Hunnam said in the interview. “There’s nothing to indicate that he actually had a stutter.”
The Sons of Anarchy star explained that the voice developed organically through his habitual script preparation. He described reading the dialogue repeatedly until patterns emerged in his mind.
“I tend to just wanna read the script over and over and over,” he said, noting that the stutter was “the first thing” he began hearing once he started working through Andrew Borden’s lines repeatedly.
Hunnam attributed part of this process to what he called a paradox in his own memory. “I have an aptitude, I have a horrible memory, but somehow an aptitude to be able to remember dialogue. So I’ll very quickly start knowing the dialogue,” he said.
From that point, he continued going back over scenes and digging deeper. That repeated process was where the voice fully took shape: “that stutter in that voice just started to present itself to me.”
The actor did acknowledge one scripted moment where Borden stammers under intense emotional strain, written by the show’s staff. Everywhere else the trait appears, however, represents Hunnam’s own addition, layered on gradually rather than planned from day one.
He made clear this was never intended as a factual claim about the historical figure. The performance choice simply felt right once he was inside the character.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story follows Ella Beatty as the Massachusetts heiress accused of killing her father Andrew and stepmother Abby with an axe in August 1892. Lizzie was later acquitted, and to this day nobody has ever been convicted of the murders. The season is the first in the anthology to center on a woman, following previous installments on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein.
Hunnam himself appeared in that third season as serial killer Ed Gein in 2025. The new season also stars Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden, Vicky Krieps as maid Bridget Sullivan, Billie Lourd as Lizzie’s sister Emma, and Sarah Paulson and Jessica Barden in supporting roles.
The actor’s previous Monster performance drew its own scrutiny when viewers objected to what they perceived as a sympathetic framing of Gein. That season accumulated 90 million viewing hours despite the backlash.