Michael Chernus’s Emmy Moment Got Cut From Devil in Disguise
Michael Chernus has built a career on memorable supporting performances in Severance and Orange Is the New Black, but when presented with the chance to lead his first series, Peacock’s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, he balked at the opportunity. He didn’t want to glorify the infamous serial killer, his “Killer Clown” persona, or his crimes, but creator Patrick Macmanus had a plan to defy contemporary true-crime tropes. “I was really drawn to Patrick’s idea of not showing any gratuitous violence, or the murders, or the clown character in its entirety,” Chernus says. “We wanted to tell this story in a way that hasn’t been told before.”
Devil in Disguise opens in 1978, as police search for missing 15-year-old Robert Piest. The investigation quickly leads to Gacy, a construction-company owner and self-proclaimed “family man” with a rap sheet, and ultimately to the bodies of 33 boys and young men buried in the crawl space under his home. But Devil in Disguise is no Monster, opting against portraying most of the murders and the more lurid aspects of Gacy’s life, such as his time performing as a clown, in favor of spotlighting his victims.
As the series chronicles Gacy’s initial interactions with police, eventually leading to his arrest and trial, each episode uses flashbacks to provide a glimpse into who these boys were before their fateful meeting with Gacy. “The volume of the lives lost is now really hitting me,” Chernus says. “Just that number, 33 victims — that we know of. There are still unidentified victims buried in various graves throughout the Chicago area, and engraved on their headstones is “We Remembered,” because we don’t know their names.” Chernus says he had “We Remembered” embroidered on the lapel of his suit jacket for the New York City premiere of Devil in Disguisie in hopes that there’s still a chance to “put a face and name to some of these boys.”
“If our show inspires someone to send in a DNA swab or dental records,” he says, “that would be so moving to me.”
You’ve been working as an actor across movies, TV, and theater for two decades, but this is your first lead role in a project of this magnitude. You’ve also talked about your hesitation to join it. What was your internal debate like when deciding to play Gacy?
I’ve been waiting my whole career to be the lead of a show, and there was a bit of, Oh man, why does it have to be this character? [Laughs] Emotionally, do I want to go through that? And what else could I bring to this story, while not wanting to do more harm than has already been done? Then there’s anticipating potential backlash for anything exploitative or sensationalized. But I became so invested in the larger responsibility of telling the story of the victims and the families.
When actors play “villains,” they sometimes insist they need to view their character as the hero of their own story. Did you feel like you needed to understand Gacy as much as you could, or was that a road you didn’t want to fully walk down?
I tried to understand him as much as I could, but, at the end of the day, I felt like there was this final part of him that couldn’t be understood, that even he didn’t understand. I believe he was a true psychopath and a raging narcissist. I had to investigate him in order to tell the story, but some of those theories of having to love your character and finding a way to humanize and understand him, even if you’re playing Adolf Hitler — I no longer subscribe to that school of thought. I still think you can’t judge your character, because we’d feel an actor’s presence in a scene judging the character. So I was just going to present him as a human being. At the same time, I didn’t want people walking away sympathizing with him. I also feel like John was so dissociated at times from what he had done, and he had so many different personalities that he could put on, that I wasn’t ever playing the whole version of him at any moment. I think he would select what aspects of himself he would allow people to see. He was almost an actor in that sense, and so, in a way, I didn’t have to fully understand him.
“Tim, John and Rob” is the Gacy-heaviest episode, and much of the hour is told through Gacy’s confession to his horrified lawyer, Sam, which was teased in the premiere. What was it like shooting that scene with Michael Angarano?
For me, episode six is the Mount Everest of this show. It’s my hardest episode, it’s the most we see of John, and it’s the closest we get to seeing violence onscreen, which is framed by these scenes in Sam’s office. We shot that during the first week of filming, so I was thrown into the deep end. It was a big challenge, because Michael and I knew how important those scenes were and we had barely started to develop these characters. It was exhausting, but, eventually, in a weird way, those scenes were kind of fun to play because it felt like doing a play.
Because the rest of the episode is framed by those confession scenes, in my mind, we’re seeing John Wayne Gacy’s version of how those events went down. That element of that episode was always interesting to me: How much is this a real account? On set, we would describe him as an unreliable narrator. And so, with the first victim, Tim McCoy, John claims it was self-defense, but that’s just what he says. Tim McCoy was not around to tell us how it went down — he was buried beneath the house. So do we take John at face value? I don’t think we should trust him.
One of the most disturbing sequences on this show is Gacy luring in and entrapping 15-year-old Robert Piest (Ryker Baloun), whose disappearance is where the series starts. Gacy brings Robert back to his house with the promise of a job, only to begin attempting to seduce him with talk of pornographic films and sexual acts. Gacy soon pulls out his go-to “handcuff trick,” leaving the young boy helpless against Gacy’s attack. How much extra thought and care were you putting into such a sensitive scene? You’re also having to show a few different versions of Gacy within that interaction.
We all knew that was going to be difficult, so it was a little later in the schedule. Director Larysa Kondracki and I talked about that scene a lot, and we had some rehearsal time with Ryker. It required a great amount of intimacy and trust between Ryker and myself. We didn’t know each other beforehand, so we’re trying to establish that as performers. We had a whole day of shooting just that scene, and it was the hardest day of filming for me because of how John flips back and forth between these different personas. It was so hard to understand how and why, in any moment, he’s flitting between being nice and harmless, and then being very threatening, and then apologizing for being threatening. What I came to is that sometimes there’s no justification for it, it’s just who this man was.
He comes on to Rob, who says, “I’m just not into that kind of thing,” and Gacy says, “Well, then I’m just gonna have to rape you,” and I push him against the pool table and pull down his pants, and then when I’m confronted by his underwear, I say, “Oh God, what happened,” as if I blacked out. He often described the personality who did the killings as this Jack Hanley character, and I don’t know if that was a self-protection mechanism to distance himself from the acts he had done, but in his mind, he could say, It wasn’t me, it was the other guy who took over. Some of his victims who survived said he would be normal one minute and the next his eyes would be dead and soulless, almost like he was possessed by some demon. Embodying that was really hard.
The last extended amount of time we spend with John is in episode seven, when he and Gabriel Luna’s Detective Tovar, the officer who first suspected John, take a few car rides together to the courthouse. Tovar is determined that John tell him how many other dead boys might be out there, while John just wants to talk about the normal life he’ll return to after all of this. Why do you feel like that dynamic and those conversations were important to showcase as you reached the end of the story?
Those are some of my favorite scenes. In our show, Rafael Tovar is our closest thing to a hero, and he really serves as a way in for the audience. We start to understand the totality of the loss and destruction and the toll it’s taking on these officers. So you have these two characters, who were so diametrically opposed, trapped in this car and forced to confront each other in this very intimate setting, and I was struck by how, if you’ve ever taken a long road trip, a car can become a confessional booth, because we’re not directly looking at each other. Once he was caught, I think he needed the glory, which is a terrible word to use, but he wanted to be on TV, he wanted to be in the papers — this is a man who wanted the spotlight more than anything. He’s not gonna come out and confess to anything more because he’s still hoping he could appeal his case, but he knows he’s trapped, and so, if he’s not going to get away with it, he sees that Tovar can be a mouthpiece for him. He doesn’t have to come out and say that he killed more than 33 victims, but if he plants that seed in Tovar’s mind, maybe that story gets out there. I also think he just liked to get under people’s skin, so he knew he could mess with Tovar in that car.
Despite the finale being set on Gacy’s execution day, you’re not seen in the present, only briefly in flashbacks focused on victim Jeffrey Rindall. It sounds like you actually shot a lot of scenes documenting Gacy’s final days. What was the thinking in throwing all of that out? Was there any disappointment for you in that decision?
The script for the finale had a ton of older John Gacy on death row, and we shot a lot of that at a decommissioned maximum-security prison in Ontario, which was creepy because it had been a real prison with a couple serial killers in there. We saw his prison cell, his last meal. It was a big swing for me as an actor. I had a white wig, all kinds of makeup, my voice was different from the younger John. And the actor-ego voice in my head that I try to silence as much as possible was like, That’s my Emmy nomination right there! I get to show the transformation and become this feeble old man on death row, desperate and trying to save his life. So when Patrick came to me months after we had finished shooting and said, “It came to me one night that I needed to cut all of the older Gacy stuff from the finale,” that actor-ego voice was like, Oh no.
Now that I’ve seen it, I think it was the right decision. His point of view was, we have to put our money where our mouth is. If we’re gonna go around saying this show is different than other serial-killer shows and we’re not gonna glorify the killer, we’re gonna focus on the victims, then to show him at the end of his life, when he is at his most vulnerable, we’re not really doing what we said we would. We’re offering the potential for sympathy and empathy. It’s true that the family members were not allowed to witness the actual execution. They were taken down in the basement of the prison and were only informed afterward. Patrick’s point was, what right do we have as a TV-viewing audience to witness what the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters of these boys who were killed didn’t get to see? They were denied that opportunity, so why should we be showing it to the American public? That really landed with me. I was like, absolutely, we don’t need to see this pathetic old man begging for his life, and we certainly don’t need to see him die.
The last moment we get with Gacy is just your voice, with Sam receiving a message from him on the night of the execution. He asks why Sam didn’t give him a construction job years before his arrest. What felt right about leaving Gacy there?
We shot my side of it, and it’s so much better to just hear the voice-over and witness Sam’s reaction to it. In some ways, it’s the perfect summation of John Wayne Gacy. This man always felt like he was the victim. Even in his most disgusting crimes, abusing and murdering young men, he always had a reason why it wasn’t his fault and why he was justified. “It was self-defense, they turned a knife on me.” “They said they were gonna kill me.” “They were gonna out me to my neighbors.” If you have this guy who was never the perpetrator in his crazy mind, he was always the victim, poor me, poor John, it’s the perfect ending to our story. He’s about to be executed, but he’s still upset he didn’t get to paint a nursery sunbeam yellow. He never focused on or understood the greater implications of what was going on in his life.
He had no one to call. This guy who was desperate to be liked and accepted by society, the only person he can call on the night of his execution is his defense attorney, to ask, “Why didn’t you allow me to work on your son’s nursery?” And the lack of awareness someone has to have to kill boys and then be like, “Why didn’t you let me into your son’s bedroom?” Thank God I didn’t, John!
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