‘Devil in Disguise’ Cast Talks Balancing Terror, Trauma, & Truth in Gacy Murders Series

In December 1978, after the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Piest, the true nature of the supposed “perfect neighbor” John Wayne Gacy came to light as his carefully constructed facade began to crumble. The police traced the teen’s last-known whereabouts to Gacy’s home, prompting a deeper investigation that uncovered a horrifying secret: the remains of dozens of young men and boys buried in the crawl space beneath his house, and others discarded in nearby rivers.

In Peacock’s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, the limited series not only retraces how authorities finally caught the serial killer but also honors the lives he stole. Each episode is named after one of Gacy’s victims, telling their story and closing with their image so they will be remembered beyond a statistic. The series also spends time with the families forever scarred by his crimes, particularly the Piest family, whose teenage son Robert was taken on his mother Elizabeth’s birthday.

Bringing both sides of this true-life horror to the screen are Marin Ireland as Elizabeth Piest and Michael Chernus as John Wayne Gacy, each delivering powerful performances that explore the emotional toll of grief and the monstrous banality of evil.

Brooke Palmer/Peacock

When it came to portraying Gacy, Chernus walked a careful tightrope to deliver an authentic, unsettling performance without leaning into the familiar tropes that often accompany portrayals of real-life monsters.

“I was interested in sort of reshaping and retelling this story that has been told many, many times since his arrest… With John Wayne Gacy, by all accounts, he was such a social guy, and sometimes described as even charming or likable or friendly in his normal day-to-day life,” said Chernus. “I was interested in that duality of someone who could do such horrific, unthinkable things, but most of the time, comes off as a completely harmless, non-threatening individual. And I think, to me, that’s scarier at the end of the day than someone who’s just, overtly, obviously evil.”

“In terms of respecting the legacy and memory of these victims, if I played him as a kind of mustache-twirling evil villain way, no one would believe that any of these boys or young men would ever get in his car or take a job at his construction company,” explained Chernus. “His charm was how he got away with it. He just seemed safe to people. He seemed normal.”

Ireland also had to avoid tropes when portraying Elizabeth Piest, ensuring that her grief and trauma didn’t slip into the stereotypical role of the “mourning mother.”

“I think it’s kind of like with anything with acting: You’re trying to pursue an objective, so as long as you’re not trying to play a quality,” said Ireland. “And this woman was in pursuit of something from the second we meet her, really, and that’s sort of what obviously led to Gacy being ultimately… I guess I wouldn’t say found, because they all knew who they were looking for from the beginning, which has made this so unique. But it’s what led to him being stopped. And so the good thing for me is that this woman was on a mission, so I could just pursue that mission with as much force and energy as I could, and let the emotions fall where they did along the way.”

In their portrayals, both Ireland and Chernus never lost sight of the fact that their characters were very real people whose lives were forever intertwined by horror. For Chernus, creating a portrait of Gacy was a bit more difficult because, for him, the core of the man was pure evil.

Brooke Palmer / Peacock

“I could never really fully understand his psychology, because his psychology is the psychology of a psychopath,” said Chernus. “I really believe that he was truly one of those rare evil individuals.”

“He had an alcoholic, abusive father who hit him all the time and hit all of his children. And so you could say, ‘Well, you have this terrible childhood and that hurt people hurt people, so that led him to be violent.’ But at the end of the day, millions of people have grown up with alcoholic, abusive fathers, and they didn’t kill 33 young boys and men,” explained Chernus. “So there was always this leap at the end that I couldn’t get to. I could never find a way to justify or even explain why he did what he did.”

“That being said, I do believe that he was just a raging narcissist who, at the end of the day, believed he was the victim. He always had a justification for every murder he committed,” continued Chernu. “He always knew why he was the victim, and he was always the one being done to and for me. The real key to playing him was that he really believed he was never wrong. He was being wronged.”

For Ireland, she found her character’s emotional core on set while filming one pivotal scene — the moment in the drugstore when Elizabeth’s son first goes missing. The day carried extra weight, as the production coincidentally shot the sequence on the anniversary of the real-life disappearance, adding an unexpected layer of poignancy and gravity to the performance.

“There was a really wild experience, which was that we ended up, it wasn’t entirely by design,” described Ireland. “The day that her son went missing, she went to pick him up from his job at the drugstore. It was on her birthday, and we shot it the day after her birthday. So we shot it on the day after the anniversary of the actual event taking place. And it was a very surreal moment, but it was very emotional for everyone on set.”

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“I will just say, I believe in many spiritual things, but I will say that throughout the whole process, I felt the presence of something, and I think it was because of the ethos of the project that we were actually trying to kind of bring these people into the room with us from the beginning, and it always felt from the beginning to me, even from the table read, I felt very connected to Elizabeth very quickly,” said Ireland. “And that is a surprise, because I didn’t expect that, but especially that particular day, shooting the scene when she sees her son first goes missing, really, the last time she ever saw him, shooting that on the anniversary, basically, of the event itself, was a very emotional day on set for even the crew.”

In the end, both actors brought a haunting intensity to their roles, with Chernus delivering a chilling portrait of a narcissistic killer devoid of remorse, and Martin embodying the opposite end of that darkness as a mother shattered by his actions. But in the end, both actors stressed the importance of remembering the victims.

“I just one thing I want to keep trying to put out there is there are still unidentified victims. There are still bodies that we don’t know the name of the young man or boy who was killed, and I hope that this show, maybe, in some small way, leads the discovery of the identity of one or two of them, and that we can help bring closure to the families of these young men who are lost,” said Chernus. “I just hope this show continues to shine light on those victims and their stories, and also maybe finding the identities of these boys.”

Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, Premieres October 16, Peacock