Dennis Quaid says Happy Face Killer ‘dismisses me’ (exclusively)

Dennis Quaid Originally wanted to say “no” to playing serial killers Keith Jesperson in Happy face.

“He disgusts me, to tell the truth,” Quaid, 70, told People of Jesperson. “I’m not really interested in playing a serial killer, but that was the relationship with his daughter – and the story is told from her point of view – that’s why I said” yes “to this. That’s what made it interesting. It’s devoted to the victims.”

Annaleigh Ashford depicts the daughter of the happy face kill Melissa G. Moore In the Paramount+ series, and Quaid says Ashford, 39, “made my job so much easier.”

“All I had to do was sit there and react to her,” Father of three addition.

IN Happy faceMelissa decides to publicly identify herself as the daughter of the lucky face killer – who was sentenced to life in jail without parole after killing at least eight women – hoping to identify a potentially ninth victim who was murdered by his father. Jesman, 69, had invoked guilty of the ninth victim’s murder in January 2010, more than three decades after he killed her in 1992. The woman was finally identified in January 2024.

“This is Melissa’s story, and I think she knows him better than he himself, in a way, because he is a shallow person,” Quaid says. “These guys, they do these disgusting acts and there are certainly the victim, but then there are the victim’s families and friends with whom this reflects. She had a very loving, sweet relationship with her father who grows up as a child. And then, 15, he was caught. How do you unite this loving father with this monster? And what does it make you as a person?”

Jesperson, 69, got his nickname thanks to the signature Smiley Faces which he would leave on his correspondences. The Canada-born long-distance physician turned in after killing several women between 1990 and 1995 and relied on murder charges in October 1995. He is currently serving four lifetime judges at Oregon State Penitentiary.

Quaid actually thought that Jesperson “remarkably easy to play because I don’t think he really has feelings,” says the Emmy-nominated actor. “I think he can make emotions, but I don’t think he really has them. I don’t think he takes responsibility for what he did. It must be this distance for him to live with himself. He just wants to act as if he is still an ordinary father and (it is) will not happen.”

While Quaid says he understands where Jesperson “comes from”, it does not mean that he sympathizes with the killer.

“I think what he did was over sex,” Parent trap Star hypothesis. “Sex is a very powerful force in us, and he was very twisted somewhere on the road. I don’t think he thinks of himself in a good way when it comes to sex. I mean, he undertook these murders to hide his evidence. You can talk about your childhood and the rest of it all you want, but I don’t buy it in the end.”

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Happy face Premiere Thursday 20 March at Paramount+.