On the Vancouver set of Happy Face, an upcoming Paramount+ series about a Canadian-born serial killer, a voice crackles over the Walkie-Talkies: “GQ is travelling.” That’s code for Dennis Quaid is on his way.
As the Hollywood star strides toward a mock jail cell, his miniature English bulldog, Peaches, struts next to him with a jaunty kerchief around her neck. Quaid is trim and muscular at 70, with no sign of Botox in his handsome weathered face. But today he has a greasy look, his thick hair slicked back for an evening shoot in his role as Keith Hunter Jesperson, a vicious murderer originally from Chilliwack, B.C.
In the early 1990s, after moving to Washington State, Jesperson raped and strangled at least eight women in the U.S. The smiley faces he drew in his confession letters prompted the media to dub him the “Happy Face Killer.”
Dressed in worn brown shoes, dated jeans and a red-sleeved baseball shirt, Quaid is gearing up for a flashback scene from the 1980s in which Jesperson stares ominously from a ridge as a fire threatens to destroy his family.
Quaid normally makes a point of meeting any real person he portrays. But he has no interest in visiting Jesperson at the Oregon State Penitentiary, where the 69-year-old is serving life imprisonment without parole. “I didn’t want to give him the entertainment value, or any kind of feeling that he was special.”
In fact, Quaid says he would have refused to play Jesperson if the series had put a sensationalist spin on his heinous acts, “because that would be like glorifying them.”
Happy Face isn’t Quaid’s first turn as a serial killer, though the one he played in The Intruder (2019) was fictional. This time around, he’s stepping into the shoes of a real life criminal and father who had a very close relationship with his daughter, Melissa Moore, when she was growing up.
In a podcast about her life, Moore describes her parent as “a mythic father” and “a real-life Superman.” As a child, she remembers feeling “very safe” with her dad, who stands 6-foot-6. Her adoration continued until she was 15, when his arrest for murder revealed the horrifying truth.
Quaid’s challenge, he says, is to make that duality believable. “This guy is part The Parent Trap dad and then he’s The Intruder – it’s kind of like, you know, double personalities.”
But in this production, the Jekyll-Hyde character isn’t going to steal the show. Happy Face puts the focus on Melissa as she tries to block her father from worming his way back into her life – unaware of the secret letters he’s sending to her teenage daughter. While these letters and other details are fictional, the eight-episode series is inspired by real events.
More of a toxic family drama than a true crime story, Happy Face shies away from violent scenes. Instead, Quaid instills terror through unsettling conversations with his on-screen daughter as they talk on faded green phones in one of the jail’s no-contact visitation booths.
Cast in the role of Melissa, Annaleigh Ashford (Masters of Sex’s Betty DiMello) says Quaid is uncanny as an insidious manipulator. “He always finds a way to remind my character that before he was a monster, he was my dad.” How does he mess with her head through a pane of glass? “With his eyes,” she says.
Stories about serial killers remind us to be “very aware of our dark side,” says Quaid, explaining that when we hide our capacity for evil from ourselves, “that’s when we start believing our own lies.”
50 Years of Quaid
As Peaches sprawls out on the floor of the jail set, wheezing so loudly she risks drowning out her master, something dawns on Quaid. “It’s my 50th year in this business – I just realized that.”
Since his debut as a bellhop in Crazy Mama (1975), Quaid has played everything from an astronaut in The Right Stuff (1983) to rockabilly legend Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire! (1989), a drug dealer in Traffic (2000) and a closeted homosexual in Far From Heaven (2002). More recently, he nailed the roles of both Democrat president Bill Clinton in The Special Relationship (2010), and Republican president Ronald Reagan, in Reagan (2024).
With his wide range and charismatic presence, Quaid is one of the finest actors to never receive an Oscar nomination. But the chameleon performer says he has nothing to prove. He’s too busy enjoying life and moonlighting as a musician – in 2023, he toured his debut solo album Fallen: A Gospel Record for Sinners – to fixate on bagging a golden statuette.
On set, Ashford confirms, “He’s always humming something.”
Then there’s his in-progress autobiography, My Lucky Life. “I’ve gotten to do a lot of things,” he says, “and that’s sort of like having seven lives in one.”
Admittedly, one of these lives was consumed by cocaine addiction, a dark period in the 1990s that led to Quaid’s come-to-Jesus moment. Other stages have included a rocky marriage to Meg Ryan – the mother of his 32-year-old son, Jack Henry Quaid – and the birth of twins in 2007 with his third wife, a realtor named Kimberly Buffington.
Quaid says he wasn’t looking for a younger woman in 2019, when he met PhD student, Laura Savoie, now his fourth wife. At 31, Savoie is months younger than his eldest son. But Quaid insists the couple’s 39-year age gap rarely comes up in their relationship. “We just don’t notice it. I guess some other people do,” he says, but adds, “everybody who is our friend has certainly gotten over it.”
Quaid does look younger and fitter than most men his age. He says that he’s always lifted weights, and he cycles and spends time with his 16-year-old twins. “They keep me young.”
His other secret to healthy aging? Work. “I love acting, even more so now than I did in my 20s,” says Quaid, who recommends staying open to exciting new projects. “That’s what makes you really feel alive.”
Asked what’s left on his bucket list, Quaid flashes his famous Cheshire grin. “I don’t know,” he says. “I just kind of leave that up to the Lord. Things come my way.”
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