Meet the people who glorify the worst people in society for money.
‘In the green room I was hanging out with all the other killers,’ reminisces actor Joseph Simpson-Bushell. ‘I remember Peter Sutcliffe, Dennis Nilsen and myself – Ian Huntley – all getting on like a house on fire.’
It’s November 2016 at County Hall in Kingston-upon-Thames, where a courtroom was being used to film episodes of the documentary series Britain’s Most Evil Killers. The reconstructers act as a visual aid, but their lack of lines limit them to an extra’s pay – only £200 a go, another re-enactor recalled, which isn’t a great rate to impersonate some of the worst people alive (or dead).
These low-budget enterprises generate their own surreal scenes, with locations often hired to film back-to-back episodes at a time, actors waiting together in sinister attire. One imagines Myra Hindley taking fag breaks with Fred West. Levi Bellfield making a cuppa for Beverley Allitt. Stephen Port doing TikTok dances in the car park with Jeremy Bamber. All in a day’s work for a jobbing actor, but for passersby, it must look like a psychopaths’ comic-con.
How do you get into this, exactly? How do you break into the ‘professional serial killer cosplay’ scene? Well, there are casting calls, obviously, for those eager to enter television heaven from the purgatory of background work and dull commercials.
Appearance is key. When auditioning to play Dennis Nilsen, Luke Ireland did not let the hurdle of physical dissimilarity stop him from embodying Scotland’s most famous necrophile civil servant. Eager to land the role, he sourced his own outfit, complete with Nilsen’s signature metal glasses. Another actor, David Wayman, recalls one obsessive producer of a Harold Shipman reenactment haranguing him for ‘photos of progress’ of his facial hair. Having shaved off his beard to film Shipman’s youth, scheduling issues forced Wayman to don an itchy false beard through the rest of production.
Other actors are fortunate enough to already resemble the murderers they portray. What could be a horrifying doppelgänger nightmare in real life can provide steady work if you know the right casting agents. ‘I applied for a role in a drama reconstruction, not knowing who it was portraying,’ Kathryn Mincer says.
‘I just knew they needed a brunette of a certain age. That was how I got into playing Joanna Dennehy’ – the spree-killer who in 2013 murdered three men, stabbed two more and stole a dog.
From books to walking tours, conventions to social media detectives, we are obsessed with what makes a killer. True crime is ubiquitous and, given its profitability, is likely to remain so. The company behind the Serial podcast sold for $25 million to the New York Times in 2020, while the My Favourite Murder true crime comedy podcast has spawned live shows, a legion of dedicated listeners known as ‘Murderinos’ and a bestseller titled Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered.
Serial killer re-enactors know their livelihoods depend upon this morbid fascination. ‘Selfishly, as a working actor, I have to make a living’, says Christian Vaccaro, who last played the Freeway Strangler. ‘It’s my job as a storyteller to capture the character, good or bad, with truthfulness. That’s all the actor has to do – 99.9 per cent of people can experience violent content and not be inspired to go out and commit a crime. It’s a matter of supply and demand.’ William Bonin, the aforementioned strangler, was convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering 14 boys and young men in California.
Besides, it can be regular work, with producers inviting actors to portray the same sociopaths again and again. ‘It’s a small world out there in the reconstruction scene’, explains The Beast of Mława, Andrzej Kunowski (played by Jonathon Michaels). ‘There are a lot of faces you’ll see over and over again.’ Portraying Kunowski was not Michaels’ first foray into evil – his striking resemblance to Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, saw him repeatedly cast as the high-ranking Nazi in multiple history documentaries. In Michaels’ telling, Nazi reconstructors often play the same member of Hitler’s inner circle across various documentaries, and subsequently recognise each other on true crime sets, exclaiming ‘Hitler!’ upon spotting a familiar face.
It’s hard to imagine, but the shooting days of true crime reconstructions are usually loaded with laughter, with notorious slaughterers telling knock-knock jokes to make victims chuckle as they bludgeon them to death. As Simpson-Bushell, who played Ian Huntley, explains: ‘Because there is generally no audio recorded you tend just to improvise dialogue. You can pretty much say anything – I remember one witness in the courtroom scenes chatting about the football results.’
And performances can have a long afterlife. Nearly all Simpson-Bushell’s friends have stumbled upon his performance during late-night channel-surfing, while Wayman boasts of receiving ‘attention from a couple of new admirers.’ Of himself, he adds, ‘not Harold Shipman. My partner is a doctor, so there have been a few jokes.’
Less joyfully, Mincer was contacted by someone who claimed to be a penpal of Joanna Dennehy. ‘He relayed some thoughts that Joanna had about my performance. They were not nice thoughts and probably not okay to be printed. It was very scary and intimidating.’
She stressed that producers called her straight away to check she was okay, and to reassure her that ‘this sometimes happens’. ‘Apparently, this is the killer’s way of asserting control in a situation where they have none. It made me stop acting for a long time.’
But outside the money and the risk of being murdered yourself, does this genre risk glorifying some of the worst people within society? As Simpson-Bushell says: ‘You are very aware that these things actually happened and you make sure everything is believable and respectful to those involved. By that, I mean the victims and their families. But not Huntley. He can go fuck himself.’
Perhaps true crime reconstructions are not glamorising sociopaths but punishing them. Locked behind bars, their face to the world is that of a weary, underpaid actor, eager to get back to chatting with Rose West at the burger van. ‘I do always hope that nasty murderers I’ve played see the episode and are appalled at the horribly old, ugly actor they see on screen representing them,’ says Simpson-Bushell, ‘it’s the least they deserve.’
