Interview: As John Wayne Gacy, Michael Chernus Is the Devil in Disguise

Like many of our great stage performers, Michael Chernus eventually got nabbed by Hollywood. Once a mainstay at Playwrights Horizons and Roundabout and the Public and Rattlestick, this veteran character actor has since built the screen career he was always destined for, with standout turns ranging from Orange Is the New Black to Manhattan to, most notably, Severance.

Now, Chernus has perhaps the biggest role of his life, playing the serial killer John Wayne Gacy in the new Peacock drama Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy. It’s an odd little life twist for Chernus, who says that he has often been told that he sort of resembles the “Killer Clown,” in a series that piqued his interest because of its desire to tell the story of Gacy’s victims, rather than prioritize blood and gore. And he had the chance to do it with a lot of his New York theater pals, which made the experience take on an even greater significance.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I guess there’s no good way of asking this, but…When you wake up in the morning, did you look at yourself and go “Wow, John Wayne Gacy is a part I could play!”?
[Laughs] It’s a good question. There actually have been people over the years who’ve said, “You know, you bear some resemblance to that serial killer John Wayne Gacy.” I’m not sure what they’re trying to say there, but it was always in the back of my mind.

It must be a very strange headspace to get into, something that dark.
There were all these different parts of him. I think some of it was the way his mind was organized from the beginning and some of it was learned behavior. In a way, he was a masterful actor; he could put on these different personalities like a chameleon to blend into normal society. That was how I realized that I didn’t have to play the whole guy. I could play a version of him in every scene, whether he was being the friendly neighbor or the blue-collar contractor or the evil guy.

The hardest part was getting to that place of a human who really lacks empathy. I believe he was a true psychopath or sociopath. There are a few moments in the show where the mask really drops, and we see the devil behind the disguise. That was really tough.

It’s interesting that, for a show about a mass murderer, you really don’t see any of the gore.
When Patrick Macmanus, the showrunner and executive producer, told me that there wouldn’t be any actual murder shown on screen, that really piqued my interest. I was immediately drawn in with the idea of focusing on the victims before they ever cross paths with John Gacy. We didn’t try to explain or justify in any way what John Gacy did, but we tried to show who he really was and who some of his victims were, these boys and young men whose history is sadly forgotten.

The example we’ve been using is Jaws. You don’t see the shark until, like, 60 minutes into the film. It’s much scarier to see a fin in the water than to see a bunch of bloody teeth.

It must have been a real head trip to go from shooting this and then going to Bubba Weiler’s play Well, I’ll Let You Go in Brooklyn over the summer, which actually has a lot of crossover in terms of cast.
Yeah, weirdly, Well, I’ll Let You Go had four Devil in Disguise cast members: Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Marin Ireland, Cricket Brown, and myself. It was a funny, odd, unintentional crossover. I’ve known Marin for 20 years and I didn’t have any scenes with her in Devil in Disguise. We thought when we both said yes that we’d be getting to work together a bunch and hang out in Toronto, but our schedules were so different that we kept missing each other.

That was your first play in a long time, for someone who spent so much of their life doing theater. How was it to get back into that particular swing of things?
It was all the feels, man. It was so nice. That’s so corny, but it was wonderful to be back in the theater, and have the show be embraced in such a strong way. Every night, there were so many actors, directors, playwrights, designers, producers, critics, journalists in the audience; it felt like a homecoming for me. I’d also forgotten how hard doing a play is. Doing it again after all these years as a person in their 40s now, it’s hard on the body, hard on the knees, hard on the stamina. It’s rigorous. But I loved it. When I do a play, I’m such a better actor afterwards. My brain is sharper.

You primarily acted opposite Quincy, who opened the show, and Marin, who came in for the last week of the run. How did you modulate your performance between these two very different but entirely excellent actors?
For me, it was thrilling just to continue to learn and discover things. I’ve known Quincy and Marin for a long time; they’re both dear friends. We were so lucky to have these two extraordinary, best of the best legends, who are both such professionals that there was never a moment where it felt like something was going to go wrong. What I learned was that that play is just very, very, very good. It works just as well with different actors, and they’re very different human beings who brought their own thing to it. To experience that play, and the intimate relationship between Marv and Maggie, with two different actors? There was no downside to it. And I love both of their performances equally.