'Mindhunter' looks at elite FBI unit
NEW YORK — 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, a charmer known for playing the lead in HBO’s “Looking” and King George in the original Broadway version of “Hamilton,” laughs generously as McCallany, a seasoned character actor and gabby raconteur 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,” which debuts Friday.
The psychological drama, executive produced by David Fincher and Charlize Theron was filmed in September 2016 in Butler County and in and around the Pittsburgh area through the rest of 2016.
It 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 clean-cut but open-minded 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 — and spawned an entire pop culture subgenre in the process — the need to understand the origins of violent behavior seems obvious.
But “Mindhunter” is set in the 1970s, an era when the starchy culture of 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 behavior 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. (Groff plays a fictionalized version of Douglas, who’s also said to have inspired characters in “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Criminal Minds.” McCallany is a fictionalized version of FBI agent Robert Ressler, believed to have coined the term “serial killer.” )
Theron became familiar with Douglas’ writing when she was researching serial killer Aileen Wuornos for her Oscar-winning role in Patty Jenkins’ 2003 film “Monster.”
A few years later, she optioned “Mind Hunter,’ envisioning it running for five seasons.
