Happy Face Cast Talk True Crime From A Female Lens and Fictionalized Additions To The Story
Happy Face is centered around Melissa Jesperson-Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), who's father is the serial murderer known as the Happy Face Killer. The new Paramount+ show is adapted from the real life Melissa Moore’s 2018 podcast Happy Face and her 2009 autobiography Shattered Silence. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with the cast and creatives behind the new true crime series.
It’s almost eerie how much actress Annaleigh Ashford resembles executive producer Melissa Moore who’s story she is bringing to life on screen. “She was someone that we talked about from the very beginning way back in 2018, 2019 when I got the rights to this,” said showrunner Jennifer Cacicio. “There is a physical resemblance, but I think even more than that Annaleigh has this compassion, this warmth, this kindness that I feel is really right for Melissa. Both the real Melissa and the character, I think their superpower is their vulnerability and creating a sense of safety to allow other people to open up and tell their story. Annaleigh really led with that empathy completely. She's just so perfect in the part.”
Moore agreed: “She's an incredible actress. She brought her own talent to the screen in portraying the essence of my story. I'm truly in awe and it's surreal.”
While the flashbacks in the series are based on Moore’s real experiences in learning her father Keith Hunter Jesperson was a serial killer, the show takes liberties to expand the story. “The present day story, I always knew I wanted to do a slightly fictionalized version of the present day story,” said Cacicio. “Partly to give privacy to the other people in Melissa's life because we're working with Melissa, but we don't have consent necessarily from everyone else in her life so I wanted to protect her kids, her siblings, but also I saw an opportunity to tell a bigger story about true crime.”
“While her emotional story and the essence of the story and this relationship with her dad, I think of it all as true and I always wanted to remain true to that emotional conflict and that character arc. The Elijah character, the Heather character, the ninth murder is invented,” Cacicio continued. “However, Keith has confessed to other murders and he said he's killed up to a hundred women. There are cold case investigations going on about him so I took this true thing and then made a made up version of it for our purposes.”
While Melissa’s story is what made Cacicio want to write the show, they realized it was an opportunity to cover additional topics in the world of true crime. “One of the things that she's talked about so much is her relationship with the media and how, with victims of crime, the media is a tool that you have to use to get your story out there, but then also they can take advantage of you. We're obsessed with [true crime], but why? These are real people, real lives,” explained Cacicio. “With Elijah, I was listening to a ton of wrongful conviction podcasts at the time. Our consultant was the head of the Innocence Project in Texas so he worked on the show with us. It just felt like another opportunity to explore some different elements of crime. Obviously race has a lot to do with who's incarcerated. Most of the people wrongfully convicted are often people that are Black and brown, so it did seem like an opportunity. If we're going to fictionalize, if we're going to make the story kind of bigger and ask some bigger questions, it seemed like the right way to expand.”
Diving into this mystery effects Melissa is more ways than she can imagine, especially when it comes to her own family. Her daughter Hazel, played by Khiyla Aynne, goes through a lot when it comes to her relationships with family and friends and learning her grandfather’s identity as the Happy Face Killer. “In a lot of ways her storyline mirrors Melissa’s, which is pretty interesting,” said Aynne, while James Wolk opened up about his journey playing Melissa’s husband Ben: “They’ve formed a life together, right? They have kids. Ben has a reputation at work, Melissa has a great job, and, for Ben, that's the American dream. Then what you see in the show is the American dream get ripped apart. For him, he wants to do anything at all costs to protect that, to maintain the integrity of that, which he can't do. For audiences, that's going to be really fun to watch Ben [and] his evolution as the string starts to become unraveled.”
Happy Face balances finding the truth versus sensationalism, especially as Melissa and Ivy work together to uncover answers for The Dr. Greg Show. “What drew me in and what Ivy was even drawn into with the story is that it is firsthand experience. I think being able to be tied to someone who has dealt with this for years and has material and sources that are firsthand is a different way of approaching a story versus getting it from newspaper articles or meeting the friend of a sister of a person and trying to fit the story around just little pockets of information,” shared Tamera Tomakili. “Bridging the balance between sensationalism and story, fact, research is just approaching it as truthfully as possible. I think the sensation comes from the drama, comes from the fact that it's already true crime, the fact that it is violence. That is a sensation. The fear. Being able to act alongside of that or confront that brings in a whole sense of emotion and also trying to stay on the objective. Ultimately when Ivy keeps both her and Melissa on the story, on the objective, moving and making sure that it is not about each of us, but the people on the other side and the story, I think that's where the balance is.”
“The devil’s in the details,” said Tomakili as she shared why Melissa and Ivy have such a great partnership. “One of my favorite scenes is when Melissa and Ivy are piecing together the story and finding the last part of the evidence. It is just a reminder that when you do work with other people, they're going to be able to catch your blind spots. You think you know everything, especially Ivy. She's a person who does her research, but she's constantly missing certain angles of the story and you see Melissa pick that up because she has a different perspective. I loved that scene particularly because it's just one tiny comment that Melissa makes that Ivy would have never thought of that unfolds everything. It's just beautiful to see all of it pieced together like puzzle pieces because someone just says one thing.”
Moore is no stranger to tackling true crime stories. In additional to telling her own story through her podcasts Happy Face and Life After Happy Face, she has executive produced The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up, and The Life and Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, among others. “I'm really drawn to people who are misunderstood or misrepresented or appear to be misrepresented. With Nicole Brown, I felt that she was a victim. The story was told a million different ways and yet I knew nothing really about Nicole other than some adjectives. She was a beautiful blonde mom that was wealthy from Brentwood. So I was fascinated in getting to know her as a story and what we didn't know,” shared Moore. “Then, for Gypsy, the same thing. I started doing interviews with her in prison and I felt like there's just so much to unpack there and to dive into. So just curiosity on these stories.”
It’s a priority for Moore to tell more stories from a female perspective. “I'm absolutely fascinated by women. Women victims and women killers fascinate me too,” she said. “Women killers are fascinating in the sense that there's a lot of mental health aspects connected or retroactive abuse, so I want to explore that more as well.”
Moore teased that she would love to explore Sharon Tate’s story next. “We hear so much about the Manson case, [but] Sharon, to me, is forever young because she was killed by the Manson family,” she shared. “I feel that we've all focused on Manson, so I’d love to tell Sharon Tate's story. That's on my dream list.”
New episodes of Happy Face drop Thursdays on Paramount+.
