Mindhunter: Probing the senseless urge to kill
To meet Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany, stars of the Netflix series “Mindhunter,” you’d never suspect they recently spent 10 long months consumed with the darkest reaches of the human psyche.
Groff, known for playing the lead in HBO’s “Looking” and King George in the original Broadway version of “Hamilton,” laughs as McCallany, a seasoned character actor with a booming voice, shares a story about training to throw out the first pitch at a Mets game.
Yet given their obvious rapport, it’s easy to see why they were cast as the leads in “Mindhunter” The series, executive-produced by David Fincher and Charlize Theron, follows a pair of trailblazing FBI agents as they interrogate notorious real-life murderers in an effort to understand — and maybe prevent — the senseless urge to kill.
Groff stars as Holden Ford, a young agent intent on shaking up the hidebound agency, while McCallany plays Bill Tench, a cynical veteran who asks what might be the series’ central question: “How do we get ahead of crazy if we don’t know how crazy thinks?”
In 2017, when criminal profiling has long since become standard practice, the need to understand the origins of violent behaviour seems obvious.
But “Mindhunter” is set in the 1970s, an era when the FBI still reflected the narrow worldview of longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, says McCallany.
“The FBI was one of the most conservative law enforcement agencies in the world, so empathizing with killers to try to understand the traumas they experienced in their childhoods and how that gives us insight into their behaviour was not something Hoover was interested in.”
Yet the nature of crime itself seemed to be changing radically at the time. The social turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s also brought with it what appeared to be a terrifying new breed of criminal — brutal murderers like David Berkowitz (a.k.a. “Son of Sam”), Ted Bundy and Richard Speck who killed repeatedly and without apparent motive other than bloodlust. Establishing “means, motive and opportunity,” as law enforcement officers had been trained to do, was no longer enough.
The series is based on the book “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” a nonfiction account written by John E. Douglas, a pioneering FBI profiler who interviewed and studied some of the country’s most notorious violent offenders over the course of a 25-year career.
Douglas and his colleagues were “really climbing an uphill battle with the FBI at that time, which just really did not function on any kind of empathy or understanding of these people,” Theron says by phone.
Theron, who says she’s fascinated by “any kind of severe behaviour,” was drawn to the material despite its disturbing nature.
“I always want to know why. Why is it that somebody has the need to control in the ultimate way like Berkowitz did or (socalled Co-ed Killer) Ed Kemper did? A lot of people think it’s really strange, my mother included, but I think it’s healthy to want to turn the light on and want to understand something that’s scary.”
She brought the project to Fincher, a storyteller known for delving into the homicidal mind in such films as “Se7en” and “Zodiac.”
“I just thought he must be somewhat obsessed with serial killers the way that I am, and I was happy to find out that he was,” she says.
Groff recalls that, from the outset, Fincher “wanted to blow up the comic-book villain idea of a serial killer,” the notion of an urbane evil genius à la Hannibal Lecter who drinks fine wine and listens to classical music.
“One of the things that is so chilling about ‘Mindhunter’ is that it humanizes the serial killers, these sad, (messed-up) guys with damaged pasts and mental problems. It’s so much scarier to look at them as human beings,” he adds.
For a show about serial killers, “Mindhunter” is a psychological deep-dive that features a lot more talking than gore — as Theron puts it, “there is nothing about this that is fast-burning.” One of its most riveting early scenes features two men conversing over egg-salad sandwiches in a prison cafeteria.
“We’ll be the only two FBI agents in TV history to go multiple seasons without pulling out our guns and going, ‘Stop!’” jokes McCallany.