Charlie Hunnam has starred in two seasons of Monster, but his experience on the two sets couldn’t have been more different..

In Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the British actor, 46, portrayed Andrew Borden, a wealthy carpenter and the emotionally distant father of Lizzie Borden. As Andrew, Hunnam stepped into the role of one of the show’s victims — a change for the actor who starred as notorious killer Ed Gein in season three of Monster.

Hunnam tells PEOPLE that the opportunity to work with the Monster co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan again motivated him to return to the anthology series for another season. Another draw? The fact that Lizzie Borden was comedic.

“I like the role. I like the story,” Hunnam says. “I felt like the tone was slightly different from [The Ed Gein Story]. It was a little more irreverent, a little more sort of bonkers, theatrical, [a] little bit more comedy, tonally than the past season that I had done. So it just felt like a fun opportunity.”

In October, at the time Ed Gein premiered, Hunnam told Entertainment Weekly that he went “into a full panic” after signing on to play the infamous murderer and grave robber. Speaking to PEOPLE in November, the Sons of Anarchy star shared that playing Ed “got in my head.”

“Before we started shooting, during the research period, everything that’s been written about Ed have been these sort of sensationalist, grotesque litanies of just horror,” he explained. “And I really started to get scared that maybe I’d made a mistake and this was just going to be impossibly bleak and dark and a horrible process.”

It wasn’t until he looked into Gein’s medical records and saw “a less sensationalized depiction of who he was” that he had a “breakthrough.”

To play Ed Gein, Hunnam wore a prosthetic eyelid, styled his hair in a combover and spoke in a higher voice. In addition to losing 30 pounds for the role, Hunnam carried the emotional weight of embodying such a dark character. Seeing him liberated from that load in Lizzie Borden was a nice change of pace for Monster director Max Winkler.

“Before, his weight got put on when we made Gein. There was very little Charlie ever,” Winkler tells PEOPLE. “I got to actually have my friend back a little bit for the making of Lizzie.”

“I liked seeing him not have the weight of having to carry Gein with him in that entire series,” he continued. “He could come in a little less, and we could laugh a little bit more.”