Transcript of Preview: “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy”

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I'm Andrea Canning here with a bonus episode for Dateland followers. We're diving into a chilling new drama series now available on Peacock, the streaming channel, which is owned by our parent company, NBC Universal. Our colleagues at NBC News Studios are producers on the project. It's called Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy.

Hey, guys, set the record straight. I killed so many.

Gacy was one of America's most prolific serial killers. In the 1970s, he kidnapped and murdered at least 33 young men and buried most of them in the crawl space beneath his house. But here's what's different about this new show from other documentaries and films you might have seen on the murders. Gacy isn't the main focus. Devil in Disguise is a show about Gacy's victims, who the young men were before they met Gacy, their family's heartbreak and trauma after their murders, and the systemic failures and societal prejudices that allowed Gacy's crimes to go unnoticed for so long. Recently, I sat down with the showrunner Patrick McManis. He was also an executive producer, director, and writer on the series. We were joined by two of the stars of the series, Michael Churnis, who plays Gacy, and Gabriel Luna, who plays the detective who helped crack the case. What followed was a conversation about honoring victim stories, crafting respectful narratives in true crime, and acknowledging the everyday heroes who solve those crimes. Well, thank you all for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Patrick, let me start with you. Why did you decide to do this show and shape it the way that you did?

Yeah. I mean, The story that I keep telling everyone is just the true story, which is that I turned it down twice. Really? Yeah, I did not want to do it. Universal Content and Peacock, they came to me a third time and they had said, Will you just take a look at the documentary? I said, Okay. I watched the documentary that is on Peacock. It's brilliant. The documentary is really, really amazing. But I didn't come away from watching the documentary wanting to do it because at the end of the day, the documentary is very, very focused on John Wayne I see. I said to them, I said, Look, if you will let me do it my way, and I didn't mean it in an obnoxious way, I just meant that I want to focus it on the police. I want to focus it on the lawyers. I want to focus on the victim's families. At the time, I said, and I would like focus it on the victims. To their credit, they said yes. From that day, they have held true to that.

As someone who, for Dateland, I sit across all the time from victims' families. That's what we do. The one thing that I felt like just quickly watching it, right away, I could feel how much you captured the victim's family. It's like the mom, and she has that conversation with her daughter about Christmas, and there's no food in the house.

I'm going to head out.

Why? No.

Just for a little bit. There's no food in the house. That's not true. Are we still having people over for a Christmas dinner? We should, right?

But that's what those families go through, where what is the point of celebrating Christmas? We don't know where our son is or whatever has happened to your loved one. I feel like that was something that was captured really, really well.

Thank you. Our team of writers were extraordinary. They understood the job was... It's not about John Wayne Gacy, it's about the wake of wreckage that John Wayne Gacy left behind him.

That's murder, right? The ripple effect.

Correct.

At the beginning of our show, you already know that John Wayne Gacy murdered these 33 people.

It's interesting because there's no mystery here. Everyone knows. There's no who done it.

Yeah, there's no who done it. I keep saying it's more of a who were they? We are on the same trajectory. The goals set forth by these detectives at that time, in that time period, the responsibility they felt that they held towards these families, trying to put faces and names and voices to the deceased, only continues now with what the writers, our writers did in that room, and piecing together these really beautiful short stories and vignettes of the experience of these very young men, young men and boys who had all the potential in the world and had it snuffed out. Another dreamless night.

What can I do for you? I don't know too much about destruction, but I'm a real fast learner. In the dead of night. No time like the now or never. Dead of night.

Why did you decide to play Gacy? Such a big role, and you played him so well. Sometimes he's creepy, sometimes he's like the guy next door. Sometimes he's funny. There's so many faces to him.

There are, and that was, in my opinion, very true of the actual man. I knew that the role would be a real challenge in that regard. But I had this great initial meeting with Patrick. He told me that there would be no murders on camera, that we were focusing on the victims, that there would be these short stories in every episode. Then he said to me, I hope you're okay with, you're not going to be in it all the time. I was It was like, thank God, that's such a relief because to have to embody John Gacy all the time just felt like maybe something I didn't want to take on just for personal mental health reasons.

You've been told that you look like him?

Here and there, people would say that, and it's not the highest compliment. But people would say, Well, you look like that killer clown. You should see if someone would write a show or a film for you. It was always in the back of my mind.

Gabriel, you get to play the lead detective, which was such an important role in real life for this story.

Yes, I was privileged to play Detective Rafael Tovar, the lead investigator on the case. We got to talk. Kids missing. Reported last scene with you.

I don't know who that is.

What did you take away as your most interesting moment of shooting or the most interesting part of your character?

There was a lot that I... I've been doing this a long time, and you're always excited when you feel that you grew. It's just something and you grew. I think for me, personally, I had played a lot of invulnerable characters. I mean, maybe physically invulnerable, in that they were robotic killing machines or heroes with flaming skulls. Or just these heroes that seemed to be... You knew they were heroes by looking at them. What I loved about this part was just the mundanity of his heroism. I thought that was pretty special.

You really captured the weight that the detectives carry with these cases. There's just some phenomenal detectives across this country that will not stop until their person is behind bars. I can feel that.

Well, yeah. It's an interesting aspect of the show because so much of the show is also about the systemic failure of Chicago PD to actually have stopped him, had multiple opportunities to stop him and didn't.

As teenage male employees start disappearing from the building, and nobody in your department looks into the guy.

But on the flip side of that coin, our group of detectives who were in that pit every single day who had their lives upended. I think they would never say it's PTSD, but I think that we could look back and say that they came out of that experience with PTSD, and they were dedicated to ensuring that every last victim was found. Where we got really the inspiration for Tovar's entire journey through the season was from a a statement that he made where he said, to this day, he's still haunted by the idea that he didn't find everyone. We never wanted to make it feel like the police are the bad guys. That is not it. It was the system failed, and then the system very much stepped to the plate to attempt to figure out how to bring every young boy home.

There's so many cases that have that same trajectory.

Absolutely. Casey's final victim, Rob Piest, fell under the jurisdiction of a suburban police Department. In that way, it was one of Casey's many mistakes at the end, where he abducted this boy fromdisplane, and that police Department had the energy and the time to focus on this case.

Yeah. That's played... His mother is played by Moraine Ireland. You actually open with this mother, the whole series, to set the tone for what you were going for.

She truly She set the tone. She set the tone at the table read and just gave this incredible speech to the detectives and was already there. I mean, we could have rolled cameras on that first day.

I hate to. I will just take it one step back and say that she did it in the audition. Yeah, sure she did. I mean this with the utmost of respect to these fine gentlemen and every other actor I've ever worked with, but I've never picked up a phone and called the Head of Casting. I talked to the head of... Tucked the head of Casting at Universal and Peacock, and I said, I don't want to even have a conversation about this. I didn't say it in a mean way. I said, Just watch the tape and then just say yes. It was about 12 minutes later. Wow.

Everything's so deliberate. You have scenes where the detectives are talking, but you're just looking at mom.

I know.

That's on purpose because that's the message of the show.

It was on the page. I wrote it that way very specifically. But the truth of the matter is that originally in the first cut, we never left her. It was a slow push in for the entire scene. We never turned around.

My wife is upset, as you can imagine.

He's got a job.

So what's he meeting with this guy for?

He's getting his license this year, saving up for a car.

All right. All right, well, listen, we have the file, but they usually show up.

Kids. I think why we are all fascinated by these true crime stories, I think what's the linchpin of all that is is how personal it all is. Yeah. And he's describing in Cinematic vocabulary, just how personal we got with Elizabeth Peace, with Morin pushing in on her face. But when you listen to your podcast or your show or any other true crime stories, I think that that is what brings people in and draws them in. When we watch this, we see the human capacity for deviance and crime and murder and also the failures of just people, human people who are doing their best, or in some cases are, in some cases are neglecting it. Their human capability for neglect. It's all just extremely personal. I think that that is really what people's fascination stems from. Yeah.

Our Dennis Murphy at Dateland always says it's the marriage, not the murder, even though the murder is, of course, very important. But it's the relationships, right? There's a title for your next. Yeah. Show.

No, but to be frank, I may put that up on the Writers Room board in the future because that's a very succinct, beautiful way of putting what the point of these shows should be, right?

Yeah. Well, because so often it's not some boogie man type character, and I think that relates especially to this story, is the fascination that it could be your next door neighbor, or it could be someone hiding in plain sight, and just how some Sometimes how pedestrian and normal some of these killers are. Some?

Yeah, it's more like 90% of them are.

Yeah, it's very rare you get a Charlie Manson or a Night stalker who just looks like a killer.

Like, run.

But yeah, sometimes it's just the jolly, chubby, Polish neighbor next door who offers to shovel your driveway for you It looks like- Shook hands with the first lady. Yeah.

By the way, you nailed the accent.

Oh, thanks. That means a lot. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, which that's not exactly the same as a Chicago accent, but just I know that cadence and rhythm and melody of the folksy midwestern. Sometimes there are some scenes where it's very present and some scenes where it's not. That was very much on purpose because I feel like our version of Gacy, it's when we were playing with his leaning into that, Shucks, folksy, I'm so harmless.

That was good. That was really good.

I would like to cooperate with you, boys. Help out in any way that I can. No, you were asking earlier I feel like what's something that we took away about our character? I feel like there was some amount of... I had to find some... I certainly don't have empathy or sympathy for the man. I feel like there's this thing amongst actors where it's like, no matter who you play, you have to find a way in to love your character, to understand your character, care about... If you're playing the worst person who ever lived, you have to... This was the first, and I always believed that in drama school, and Now I feel like that's BS. Maybe I... He was a human being. That's a fact. He lived and was flesh and bone. How How do you make that final leap? And I don't know. Some of it was just the imagination and creativity of an actor. And I think if we're talking about what draws people to true crime, sometimes I think it's that. These things that just don't make sense, these senseless stories, these murders, and we're trying to make sense out of it.

We want there to be a hero who solved it. We want there to be a reason why he did it, a motive. Yes.

There was an insurance money, or they wanted custody of the child or jealousy.

Completely, yeah. For me, it's like sometimes you just get to a point where there isn't an actual explanation.

Sometimes there's just not. We do have datelines where at the end, it's like you ask, Why did they do this? I don't know. You don't always get it wrapped up in a bow where you have all the answers, and even if it's wrong, you know why. You don't get that every time.

You definitely don't, yeah.

The other thing that you didn't go hard on was the clown theme. We saw elements of the clown. You were sitting at the table looking at the evidence with the clown costume, and we see the clown paintings. But it's not like you're going hard every second on Clown, Clown, Clown, which is what Gacy is known for.

No, yeah. I don't know if we can have a spoiler, but you never see the full clown. You never see me fully, full face on camera as the clown. That was very, very intentional. I think it was one of the things I first asked you in our first meeting was like, How much of the clown are you going to show? Because I was not interested in that part of the story. It's part of the story, I feel like, that got overdone in the '70s because it sold newspapers. The killer clown, and it was something unique and obviously super creepy, but it actually was a small part of who he was.

You didn't need it, though. You were still creepy and scary and all of it. You don't have to be in a clown costume to freak people out.

Yeah, but I agree. I think the clown is the least creepy thing about John Gacy. If anything, I think it has done a lot of harm because it has softened his image or humanized him. Because even though clowns are scary, it is also there's a childlike innocence to it. I think it helped with his cult personality and how parts of the heavy metal scene embraced him. I think it was one of the many things we were hoping to do with this is rewrite the story on him and be like, This guy's not cool. There's nothing interesting about him. There was nothing redeeming about this man.

When you researched the victims and their families, what really stood out to you most before you started all of this?

How young they all were.

Just as young as 13.

Yeah. 12? Wait. 14. I think he was... Yeah, the youngest had just turned. Just turned. Yeah.

Randy Ruffet. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Just to piggyback on that, and it's a story that I've been telling quite a bit, is that I have a very strange ability to compartmentalize and not get affected by the stuff that I'm writing or the things that we're filming or- Join the club. There you go. Well, I think you have to, right? I hear you. Yeah. But I was flying back and forth between Toronto and LA every weekend to be with my... I have two sons and my wife. This one Sunday was after this particularly simple but also very powerful Friday night of shooting that I was having a football catch with my eldest son, who's 13 at the time, he's 14 now. It For the first time in 18 months of working on this project, it was the very first time where it hit me and that I'm having a catch with my son, who was the same age as the youngest victim. I had to excuse myself and go inside into the bathroom. It was the first time that I actually lost it. I really lost it. I agree wholeheartedly that that is one of the primary things that affects you.

I think the other one is just is a little bit about how, and we specifically chose the stories that we chose in order to shine a light on a different pocket of the system failing and the prejudices within the system that allowed Gacy to get away with what he got away with. We have a story that is about a coming out story. We have a story that is a straight love story. We have a story that is a sex worker story. We have a story that's a grooming story. Again, we only could tell six out of the 33, but each of them represented this just utter failing of the world to take care of these young boys. And again, I'll just keep saying it over and over again, that they had so many opportunities to stop the number at two, to stop the number at eight, to stop the number at 14, right? And they just failed at every turn.

Yeah, that's such a good point. At the time in the '70s, there was such a judgment on the victims, and it was labeled like they were deviants or run aways or that there was some judgment on these boys that allowed people to distance themselves from the humanity.

This is a lot like another story I'm covering, the Gilgo Beach murders, where a lot of sex workers were involved and just fell through the cracks.

And were dehumanized because they were sex workers.

I always say this, if it was the soccer mom in Westchester County, New York, if they were bringing down soccer moms, it would be 24/7 coverage, right?

Yeah. That was one of the many things. His last victim, Rob Peace, at the time, the paper said, Well, this was a good boy from a good home, and all of a sudden, everybody was interested. But what Patrick was saying was that one of the things that struck me, too, is his victims were from all kinds of backgrounds. Predominantly, they were from lower class, blue-collar homes, a lot from a similar neighborhood in Chicago. Some were sex workers, but some were not. Some were straight, and some were gay, and some were figuring out who they were. But I think all of his victims, there was this universal stamp put on them at the time, and society just dehumanized them.

Yeah, we can't do that. Gabriel, I was curious. I know I realized this was such a long time ago, what happened to the detective you played? Also, I don't even know, to be honest with you, what happened to Gacy. If you could just... I'm just curious.

Because This is the approach we were taking, it being a fictionalized dramatization of this story. It was important to us not to draw specifically from the real men and women who were involved in this case. But after we wrapped, I went in and did my own reconnaissance and found out where our hero was. He returned back to Texas. He is living down there with his wife.

I think he's going to be pleased with your performance.

I hope so. Absolutely. You're fantastic. John Gacy was executed in 1994 by lethal injection. It was, I think, the second lethal injection in the state of Illinois. They just changed over to lethal injection. Yeah, so he was executed.

Yeah, that's a scene in the show where the lawyer is saying, Shut up. Lethal injection is here now, the death penalty. What do you... Stop running your mouth off. Yeah.

It was a big deal at the time. There were protesters on both There were people who were anti-death penalty protesting outside, and then people who were very pro kill the clown. It was a whole media circus, so many things around this case at the time. There are still unidentified victims problems. One great hope of mine is that maybe through telling the story and just shedding a different light on it, that maybe we aid in putting a name to one or two or three of those boys that still are unknown their identities.

That would be amazing if something like that could come out of this. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it has been a pleasure talking to all of you, and congratulations on this. Really, just I can't say enough good things.

Thank you. Thank you so much taking the time.

Thanks.

I love hiking. Fresh air, stunning views, nature. But I, like Level Health, think hiking needs to stay in the mountains. Level Health are keeping their prices the same for the rest of 2025. It's about time a health insurer did. Level Health, it's about time. Health Insurance products provided by Level Health Limited are underwritten by Aviva Insurance Ireland DAK. Aviva Insurance Ireland DAAC is regulated by the regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Level Health Limited trading as Level Health is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.