‘Happy Face’s Dennis Quaid Reveals If He Met the Serial Killer, Why He Took the Role After Hesitation & More

Dennis Quaid plays serial killer Keith Jesperson in the new Paramount+ series Happy Face, which is told from the point-of-view of Jesperson’s daughter, Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford). Jesperson is currently serving a life sentence without parole in prison, but he had no involvement in the show, which was based off of Moore’s podcast and book.

“I read Melissa’s book, which is really what I based the character on. Usually when I play a real-life person, I want to meet them, but I didn’t want to meet this guy,” Quaid tells TV Insider. “I didn’t want to give him any kind of satisfaction or entertainment, to tell you the truth.”

Showrunner Jennifer Cacicio reiterated that there was no desire for anyone to reach out to Jesperson. “[Melissa] shared some of Keith’s letters with me, and I shared a few [with the cast], so I think that was especially important for Dennis because none of us were reaching out to Keith,” Cacicio explains. “We didn’t want to involve him. So that was partly how Dennis built the character.”

Meanwhile, Ashford praises the actor for portraying “not only the grotesque, wild, crazy, disgusting part” of Jesperson, but also the “vulnerable” side of the convicted murderer. “We always talk about having chemistry with people we’re doing romantic scenes or scenes with people that we’re married to, but me and Dennis had amazing chemistry as father and daughter,” she shares. “It was such easeful chemistry and I’m so grateful for that. … As an actor, for me, he made it so much easier to play the conflict that this woman has — this inner struggle of the love that she has for this man before he committed this heinous act and the memory of the love of that and who he is to her now.”

Below, Quaid, Ashford, Cacicio, and Moore break down the casting, why they wanted to be part of the show, which scenes were hard to shoot, and more.

You’ve said you were hesitant about taking on the role as Keith. What ultimately made you want to do it?

Dennis Quaid: The story is told from [Melissa’s] point of view. I wasn’t really interested in playing a serial killer because I don’t really like to go there in my everyday life, but what sets it apart is that [he and Melissa] had a very loving close relationship when she was a child. … I admired the real Melissa as a person. She’s taken that and reached out to the victim’s families and families of other serial killers’ victims to form a group, in a way, to really kind of deal with what this brings up in you as a human being.

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In the end, it’s not about a serial killer or any kind of glorification of that. It’s really about the victims. That not only includes the victims, but the victims’ families and also the families of these monsters. There’s so many lives that are shattered over one heinous act, and that’s what I think Happy Face really explores.

Annaleigh Ashford: This show is not from his point of view, it’s from my character’s point of view, so I think it helps the audience understand my point of view to make [Keith] vulnerable. You don’t want it to be relatable, but you want it to be relatable for my character.

Was there a scene that was particularly hard for you to shoot?

Ashford: There were a lot of them. I was really struck at how the show is about a lot of things, but one of the things that it’s about is family and secrets and how secrets can’t stay in the dark forever. It’s really uncomfortable to love somebody when they did something wrong. What would you do if you had a family member, if they did something like this? How would you feel? You would take it on and carry around their guilt and shame; even if you didn’t commit the act yourself, you’d feel like you had a part in it. What does that feel like? That was really uncomfortable for me to sit in for months at a time.

There’s a lot of family stuff in Episode 4 and Episode 7, and I found that the most heartbreaking. It’s a family affair, and what do you do with these disgusting family secrets that carry on for generations to come?

Quaid: We don’t show the murders, which I’m grateful for. I think it makes it more chilling in a way, too. It’s also for the victims.

What did you do to prepare for the role? Because I have to imagine that it was pretty heavy.

Ashford: I wanted to make sure that the set and the company and the cast and crew, that everybody had a really safe, healthy, lovely, happy environment because we were working on such dark content. I was really lucky to have such a strong script. I had such incredible source material and the script really was a blueprint.

Like Melissa, we really wanted to be respectful of the victims of the real crimes, so the crime elements of this show are fictionalized, but Melissa’s story is not.

Quaid: I read her book and I really thought about what [Keith’s] psychology was. It turns out it’s kind of remarkably easy to play a serial killer because they don’t really have emotions, so there’s nothing you really have to reach for. This guy wasn’t really intelligent. He’s kind of removed, and I don’t think he’s accountable for what he did.

Paramount+

Melissa, was it harder for you to see someone portraying you or portraying your father?

Melissa Moore: That’s a good question. I thought it would be harder seeing someone portray me, but it was actually harder to see someone portraying my father. I was skeptical, to be honest, that they could cast someone that could really give off the essence of my father. I think people get hung up on the physicality of him. They want to make the typical, stereotype, serial killer vibe of a personality that’s cold, calculating. But whenever I see serial killers fictionalized on TV, it never felt believable to me, so I had low expectations of how Dennis would bring it to the screen, but I was so blown away with how he captured that my father betrayed my trust. It’s not about the physicality, it was about the emotional manipulation where he knew my weakness was desiring the love of a father, so he would lure me in with, “I still love you, I’m still your dad,” and then he would hurt me by taking that vulnerability when I would relax. Seeing Dennis and Annaleigh do that toxic entanglement onscreen, it was astonishing.

How did the casting of Melissa and Keith come about?

Jen Cacicio: Annaleigh was someone we talked about from the very beginning, since my first pitch to CBS. Part of it is just that they do have similarities in how they look, but I think more than that, it was just that Melissa leads with such empathy and compassion and she’s so warm. People just open up to her. Annaleigh has something very similar and she’s just very warm and felt like a real person. She was someone we talked about from the very beginning, even though she didn’t get cast for a few years.

Dennis came late, right before production started. I always knew I wanted to cast someone who was kind of more of a nice guy than someone who always played a villain. I wanted the viewer to feel the conflict that Melissa feels in real life, which is, “I love this man, he’s my father, he had good qualities, and yet he’s this monster,” and kind of that inner conflict, which is what this show is all about. I felt like if we cast someone who was too much of a bad guy, you wouldn’t really be rooting for Melissa in the same way.

You put your story out there before, but was there any hesitation in putting it on such a big platform?

Moore: Absolutely. I think there’s always hesitations. When you come forward with your story, you get the love and hate. You get people who stand by you and support you, and you get people that hate you. The more you put your story out there, the more backlash that can happen. I personally really cared about how this was portrayed. A lot of people see something and they think, “Oh, that’s 100 percent true,” and they judge you off that and it can be what you’re known for. I felt like I trusted Jen to tell the story in a way that came off very authentic.

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How did your family feel about it?

Moore: My family is similar to a lot of other families affected by crime. We all become fragmented in how we deal with the grief and the fallout. For me, it was about being an advocate, being public, letting other people know that they’re not alone. For my mother, it was about becoming a Salvation Army counselor where she helped women off the street. She did her work and advocacy in her own way. Then my sister as an ER nurse, and my brother in the military as a veteran. We all found our own way to deal with it. For my siblings, it was something they wanted to be private about, so I was concerned about whether being public with my story would out them. Jen did a great job of really making their essence known, but without really bringing them in.

Happy Face, Series Premiere, Thursday, March 20, Paramount+