A ‘Killer’ role: Teri Hatcher resurfaces on Lifetime
Some years after her last starring role in a series, Teri Hatcher is playing someone else who’s desperate. The Golden Globe Award- and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning “Desperate Housewives” alum is in a dangerous situation in the fact-based Lifetime movie “The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story,” premiering Saturday, June 29. Hatcher has the title role as a Wichita. Kan., heart attack victim’s wife who starts getting threatening phone calls in the late 1970s, during the reign of terror in the area by the so-called BTK Killer. (The “BTK” stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill.”) While Finley’s husband (Tahmoh Penikett, “Battlestar Galactica”) is recovering, she disappears, with police fearing she may have fallen prey to the serial killer they’re pursuing. However, she soon reappears, leading authorities to wonder if she has pre-existing ties to the felon they seek. The film was directed by TV veteran Greg Beeman, who also guided the recent Lifetime film “Mommy Meanest.” “Comedy is sort of my happy place,” Hatcher allows, “but I’ve done a few heavy dramas, though not in a long time. And I’ve never played a person who actually existed before, and that was the beginning of how I approached this. Even though (Finley) and her husband are no longer alive, I still felt that I needed to give as much respect as I could to what this woman’s life and her journey were like, in an authentic way. I did as much research as I could, to come at this from an empathetic point of view.” As she participates in the “Ripped From the Headlines” genre of true-crime dramas, Hatcher reflects, “I really felt like there was a lovely balance between trying to do intricate character work and telling a story like this in a suspenseful, entertaining way. I think that’s what Lifetime is trying to do with these movies. Clearly, there is a massive amount of people interested in these kinds of stories, and I’m excited to be a part of that.” Also one of TV’S former Lois Lanes (in “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”), Hatcher is about to be in evidence elsewhere as well, if not physically. She voices a robot character named Muthr that cares for a teenager (voiced by “Roswell, New Mexico’s” Janine Mason) in an alien-populated world in the animated Apple TV+ series “Wondla,” adapted from a best-selling book series and premiering Friday, June 28. The first part of a trilogy, it reunited Hatcher with a saga she already knew. “I actually had recorded all of the audiobooks of the series,” she explains, “so I had played all of the voices. When it came to Apple TV+ and Skydance Animation doing this version, the author – Tony Diterlizzi – really championed me to play Muthr. The studio went with that, and I was really happy to get to be able to do the job. The animation is just stunning, very unique. And it’s so full of imagination and wonder, but it’s also grounded in some very human themes.”