Charlie Hunnam has a new hobby, and it started with a pile of dead trees.

Ahead of shooting "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story," the actor says he kept noticing felled trees along Los Angeles roads and started chopping them up himself, filling his pickup truck with what became roughly 10 tons of wood. He used the excuse to buy the Scandinavian axes he'd wanted for years. It helped, sort of, that his character, Andrew Borden, is an undertaker and ax collector in the show who doesn't blink at trimming a corpse's legs to fit a coffin.

"I ended up with probably about 10 tons of wood and bought some great axes and started becoming quite the axeman," Hunnam told Variety.

That lightness runs through the whole season, and it's a deliberate swerve from the grim tone of the Ed Gein installment Hunnam led before this one. Ella Beatty plays Lizzie as curious and naive, her world cracked open by a new housemaid, Bridget Sullivan (Vicky Krieps), who introduces her to forbidden books and a sexual awakening, while Rebecca Hall's stepmother Abby is written as cruel enough to be funny.

"I've never played a true out-and-out villain," Hall said. "I just loved on the page how funny she was." Beatty, meanwhile, called the part a "huge responsibility," both to the real Borden and to the show's anthology format, and said she felt an immediate pull toward the character during her audition.

What none of that farce can paper over is how little is actually known about the case. Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted in 1893 for the hatchet killings of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, a verdict that came in just 40 minutes, according to TheWrap. Police at the time never checked her for bloodstains and let the crime scene get compromised, which is a big reason the murders are still officially unsolved.

Several of the show's more dramatic flourishes have no basis in the historical record. TheWrap notes there's no evidence supporting the long-running theory that Borden was gay, and while she did share a real intimacy with maid Bridget Sullivan on screen, the two were reportedly not close in life. Sullivan's account of hearing Lizzie laugh around the time of the murders was actually used against her at trial. Borden's real friendship with actress Nance O'Neil began only after the acquittal.

The season also carries a subplot on Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian noblewoman played by Vicky Krieps in a dual role, shot partly in castles around Rome rather than New England. Whether that thread ties back to Fall River in any satisfying way is something audiences will have to judge for themselves as they work through the episodes.