Masters Of Sex star Michael Sheen is set to make his directorial debut, with Deadline reporting that he’ll be making a movie about serial murderer Gary Ridgway, known to the media as the Green River Killer. Ridgway killed at least 49 women in the Washington state area in the ’80s and ’90s, earning himself the ugly distinction of the American serial killer with the most legally “confirmed” kills. Now, Sheen will tell the story of his life and eventual capture, working from a screenplay he himself wrote, which landed on the 2015 Black List of great unpublished scripts.
And—possibly displaying a bit of directorial self-awareness of his actors’ strengths—Sheen has also cast himself in the film, not as the heroic detective who caught the killer, but as the necrophiliac serial strangler himself. (Did we mention Ridgway had sex with the corpses? Ridgway had sex with the corpses, one of the details that’s made him such an unsettlingly fascinating subject for a number of TV movies and feature films in the past.) Sheen’s script is inspired by a graphic novel, Green River Killer: A True Detective Story, by artist Jonathan Case and writer Jeff Jensen, the son of the man primarily credited with bringing Ridgway to justice in 2001.