LOS ANGELES, Oct. 18 (UPI) — Actors Daniel Zovatto and Tony Hale said the movie, Woman of the Hour, on Netflix on Friday, honors the victims of Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game Killer.”
Zovatto plays Alacala, who appeared on a 1978 episode of The Dating Game.
Anna Kendrick directed the film and stars as Sheryl, the contestant on Alcala’s episode of the matchmaking show. The film flashes back from the taping of the episode to Alcala’s relationships with women he killed.
Alcala stood trial in New York and California for killings he committed in the ’70s, and was suspected of more in Seattle. Zovatto said he looked at missing persons photos of Alcala’s victims during filming to remember what his character did in real life.
“He was capable of making people feel very comfortable and very at ease,” Zovatto told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. “That just gave me a big opening into who this guy is and how he behaved — not just his intellect, but his charisma and his manipulation.”
Clips of Alcala’s episode have been uploaded to YouTube, but the film fictionalizes it. For example, Alcala was contestant No. 1 in the actual show, but he is No. 3 in the film, and the dialogue has been changed.
Tony Hale plays a fictional Dating Game host, not the actual host, Jim Lange. Hale said Woman of the Hour draws parallels between Alcala taking advantage of victims’ trust and The Dating Game objectifying women for entertainment.
“The Dating Game and my character represented the culture at the time and obviously the objectification of women,” Hale said. “It was the victim’s story and then how the culture was treating women.”
Alcala was arrested in 1979 when one of his victims managed to call police at a rest stop. After two death sentences overturned on appeal and a 25-year-to-life sentence in New York, a California jury sentenced Alcala to death in 2010.
He died in 2021 before his execution. Zovatto said he was shocked how comfortable Alcala felt going on television believing he would not get caught.
“He had the ability to sit in front of this audience and just know deep inside what he had done,” Zovatto said. “Nobody else knew but himself.”
The flashbacks show how Alcala earned women’s trust by taking photographs of them, giving a ride to a hitchhiker, or in one case, helping a woman move furniture.
“He had the capacity to make people feel special, make them feel like they were being heard,” Zovatto said. “If you didn’t say the right thing or you didn’t make him feel how he wanted to feel, the real Rodney would come out.”
Although the host in the movie is fictional, Hale did study Lange to capture the rhythm of a game show host and his ability to deliver sexual innuendo no matter how uncomfortable it may have made guests feel.
“I honed in, honestly, on his speech,” Hale said. “That kind of detachment was interesting to me.”
Hale said his ’70s plaid polyester suit also gave him a sense of the host’s outsized confidence.
“You know he gave a thumbs up to it,” Hale said. “He was like, ‘Yeah, I like this.'”
Zovatto said Alcala’s “awesome” ’70s bell bottoms and patterned shirts were fun for him. Otherwise, playing a killer and re-enacting murder scenes was unsettling.
“I wasn’t sleeping much,” Zovatto said. “Going back to your own routines and what I like as a person, little by little, it starts to just be something that you did.”
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