True- crime movie challenged actors to stay ‘ honest’ At a glance

TV REVIEW /

“Final Vision” will premiere at 8 p.m. Sunday on Investigation Discovery, with “Jeffrey MacDonald: People Magazine Investigates” to be shown after the film.

Scott Foley approaches all of his roles in the same way: He strives to tell the most complete story possible through his performance.

Such is the case in “Final Vision,” premiering Sunday night on Investigation Discovery.

The made-for-cable film is based on the true story of the longestrunning criminal case in U.S. history.

Jeffrey MacDonald (Foley) is a handsome, Ivy League-educated Army Green Beret doctor who was convicted of brutally murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters in 1970. The story is told through the eyes of best-selling author Joe McGinniss (Dave Annable), who was approached by MacDonald to write a book about his personal nightmare as he was about to go to trial.

McGinniss originally thinks he is writing about an innocent man being railroaded by a flawed legal system but eventually sees the twisted psychology at the core of the story and exposes a far-moresinister man behind the charming and heroic facade MacDonald portrays.

The work that McGinnis did became the 1983 best-seller “Final Vision.”

Foley, who was born two years after the murders, wasn’t aware of the story when the studio sent his agent the script for “Final Vision.” But even before he read it, the actor started researching the case.

“I went back and read Joe’s book and a book called ‘A Wilderness of Error,’ written by Errol Morris, and I watched a bunch of interviews,” Foley said.

“I do this kind of research not only once I get a role but for every audition. I have to feel like at an audition, every other guy sitting there, I have done more preparation than them — that I’ve done the work.”

Foley could have reached out to MacDonald, as he’s still serving a life sentence for each murder at a prison in Maryland. McGinniss, though, died in 2014. Foley and Annable share the fact that neither has played roles based on real people — something different because true stories come with knowing a lot about where the story begins and ends.

Annable, who is a fan of true-crime stories, decided that the key to playing McGinniss would be curiosity.

“I tried to take every scene my character was in and he was just curious. He was trying to get the story. He was looking into this guy’s soul while he was talking to me and trying to figure out who he was,” Annable said. “Journalists see the world in a very different way, and I tried to tackle that curiosity in this case.”

Foley adopted a similar approach.

“When I am playing MacDonald, where he is first telling McGinniss that he’s innocent and needs the writer to follow him around, I can’t be thinking (that), at the end of the movie, I am going off to prison,” Foley said. “I have to throw all the knowledge away for the moment.

“But, it’s that way in every film. When you do a movie, you get the whole script, and you know what you are going to say. But you have to be as honest in each moment as possible without telegraphing the next moment.”