Even after they told Ken Giglio about a gig he’d been hired to do — playing a starring role on “Who the (Bleep),” he didn’t know all the details.
“The only thing they said was, this is a really dark, you know, not a nice guy,” he told me. “And I said, OK fine. And then the associate producer joked with me and said, ‘Often we’ll cast people who look a lot like the characters they need to pay, but usually the actors are younger and better looking than the characters they play. In your case, that’s the opposite, don’t worry.’”
He didn’t feel that much better to learn he’d be playing the notorious BTK Killer.
He didn’t need acting classes for it. “The closest thing I had done was I was a background actor in the movie HBO ‘Game Change,’ where I played a police officer, but I didn’t even make the final cut. I was standing behind Ed Harris and never made the movie,” he says.
But when the episode came out on “Who the (Bleep)” last summer, he got a lot of favorable feedback from friends at a premiere viewing party at his house. “They’d say something like, ‘I don’t think I want to spend any time alone with you.’ I’m pretty sure they were kidding.”
Giglio is one of scores of local actors, professional and amateur enlisted to be in one of the endless crime re-enactment shows on Silver Spring-based Investigation Discovery. A story I wrote about the phenomenon appears in this week’s Washington Post Magazine.