Foley, Annable took honest approaches to ‘Final Vision’
Scott Foley’s approach to acting starts the same way no matter the project. He believes it is his job to tell the most complete story possible through his performance. As in the case of the Investigation Discovery film “Final Vision,” which airs at 10 p.m. Sunday, Foley finds the script has most of what he needs, but he continues to dig just a little deeper.
What he found with the made-for-cable film is a script based on the true story of the longest-running criminal case in U.S. history. Jeffrey MacDonald (Foley) is a handsome, Ivy League-educated U.S. 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 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 believes he is writing about an innocent man being railroaded by a flawed legal system but eventually sees the twisted psychological at the core of the story and exposes a far more sinister man behind the charming and heroic façade MacDonald portrays. The work that McGinnis did became the 1983 best-selling “Fatal Vision” (Signet).
Foley, who was born two years after the murders, was not aware of the story when the studio sent his agent the script for “Final Vision.”
“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 says. “That was for the benefit of playing my character so I had an idea of what I was getting into.
“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.”
That process has worked well for Foley, as the Kansas native has been performing in TV shows and films since 1995. His credits include “Dawson’s Creek,” “Felicity,” “Scrubs,” “True Blood” and his current series, “Scandal.”
Annable agrees with Foley that the job of an actor — especially when playing characters based on real people — is to pull together as much information as possible so each decision made in the portrayal is based on as much truth as can be found. The limitation for Annable was, while there’s a lot of material on MacDonald, there’s not so much on the writer. His greatest resource was reading all the books McGinniss had written and using that to get a picture of how the writer worked and thought.
Foley could have reached out to the real MacDonald, as he’s still serving a life sentence for each murder. But McGinniss died in 2014.
Annable says the important thing to do with a role based on a real person is to play each moment as honesty as possible. For him, that meant McGinniss entered into the agreement to write the book with an open mind. That slowly changed — as did his performance — as more information became available.
Annable decided the key to playing McGinniss was 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 says. “Journalists see the world in a very different way and I tried to tackle that curiosity in this case.”