Mindhunter star Holt McCallany talks about redressing the serial killer genre

The serial killers to whom David Fincher introduces us in his new Netflix hit Mindhunter are very different from the suave Hannibal Lecter archetype. They pleasure themselves with ladies shoes (size 16), and boast of decapitating their mother (before, naturally, having sex with the neck). You wouldn’t want them around for fava beans and a nice chianti.

“That was very much David’s mission statement,” says character actor Holt McCallany, who plays seen-it-all-before FBI behavioural science agent Bill Tench in the 10-part thriller (which we recommend you binge immediately). “Not to take anything away from Anthony Hopkins and Silence Of The Lambs… but this idea of the serial killer as a wonderful character… witty, charming, clever… an opera aficionado and also a gourmet chef… Someone who would be the perfect dinner guest if he didn’t want to put you on the menu. That is not what these men are like in real life. They are deeply fractured, depraved, sadistic, scary individuals. You look at the Jeffrey Dahmers and John Wayne Gacys of this world and you think, ‘Oh my God.’”

Mindhunter is adapted from a memoir of the same name by FBI behavioural scientist Joe E Douglas, who through the ’70s and ’80s visited Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Ed Gein and others in prison. He hoped to gain a sense of how and why they committed their unspeakable crimes. At the time, serial killers were regarded as monsters to be locked away and forgotten. Douglas’s great insight was that by deepening our understanding of these murderers, future killers could be more easily apprehended – or stopped from taking lives in the first place.

The experiment is put into practice in the first season of Mindhunter (five are planned), when the FBI sit down with Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton), a real-life sociopath known as the “Co-Ed Killer”.

“Some of the crimes Ed Kemper committed are truly astonishing,” says McCallany. “Cutting his mother’s head off for example. Then putting her voice box down the garbage disposal. He also buried women’s heads in the backyard and placed them looking up at his mother’s room, just because his mum said she liked people looking at her. I mean, seriously?” The Douglas character in the TV series is named Holden Ford and played as an eager boy scout type by Frozen star Jonathan Groff. As his senior partner, Tench is a voice of incredulity, scepticism and reason. But the characters are deeper than their naive/cynical archetypes and, as Mindhunter continues, we see them as rounded individuals rather than cop show cliches.

McCallany is of Irish-American heritage. As a youthful tearaway his despairing parents sent him to school at Newbridge College in Kildare in the hope of setting him straight. He is also Fincher regular, having appeared in Alien 3 and Fight Club.

“It’s the way that his mind works,” says the actor of working with Fincher. “Whatever walk of life he’d chosen, he’d have been successful. If he wanted to be the head coach of an NFL football team he would have multiple Super Bowls; if he was a general he’d go from victory to victory. He’s also got a very dark sense of humour, which helps.” As a veteran of the big screen, for McCallany television offers a unique opportunity for long-form storytelling.

“Never before in human history has there been a medium where you can examine a character in as much detail as modern television. There simply isn’t room in a two-hour movie or a three-hour play. The famous screenwriting guru Robert McKee said to me, ‘Tony Soprano is a more complicated character than Hamlet’, and he was right. We’ve got nine seasons of Tony Soprano. We get to see him in all manner of situations – with his family, with other mobsters, with law enforcement. You just can’t do that in a movie.”

Mindhunter season one is available now on Netflix.