Dennis Quaid is used to playing beloved characters, but that’s not the reason playing a serial killer made him feel hesitant.
“Happy Face,” Paramount+’s upcoming drama series based on the real story of Melissa G. Moore, daughter of Keith Jesperson aka the Happy Face Killer, Quaid portrays the infamous murderer of at least eight women in the early ’90s. (In real life, Jesperson actually claims to have murdered many more).
At the SXSW world premiere of “Happy Face,” Quaid shared why he had reservations before saying yes to the role.
“I really had to think about this one for a long time, simply because I didn’t want him to feel any kind of glory about himself being out there, which is exactly what he wants,” Quaid said of Jesperson, who is serving four consecutive life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary. “It’s entertaining for him, I think. But to play somebody like this has an effect on you. It has to if you have to approach these places, to figure out these people. And it turns out that serial killers aren’t really all that difficult to play because they really don’t have many emotions to speak of. They don’t feel people’s pain.”
Victoria Will/Paramount+
Ultimately, he agreed to join the project because it was told through the layered point of view of the killer’s daughter, played by Annaleigh Ashford.
“When there’s a murder, there’s the victim, then there’s the victim’s family and friends. There’s also the murderer’s family and people in his life, so it reverberates. These are things that may be hard to speak of, but they probably should be spoken about.”
Moore, who has become an advocate for families affected by violence and abuse since going through her own trauma, had no boundaries with what she was willing to share with showrunner Jennifer Cacicio.
“I took all my letters from my father that were unopened — some were opened — to Jen. I just didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t want to read them,” she revealed. “And then I just discovered that they burned in her house fire in California.”
Moore added that through her life, she “felt a lot of guilt” from clues she’d seen through her life, which are documented on the series. “They didn’t make sense. They were just bread crumbs and as they became an adult, I started to see that they were nuggets of the truth,” she said. “The flashbacks are representations of the true story.”
Cacicio was drawn to the story because of Moore more than Jefferson — she liked the idea of taking a different approach the true crime genre.
“We don’t show any violence in the show. It’s much more about her emotional story and this psychological cat and mouse between them,” said Cacicio. “I thought it had the potential to be a new twist on something that we’ve seen before.”
“Happy Face” premieres on Paramount+ on March 20.
