Gabriel Luna on playing a real-life character after The Last of Us in Devil in Disguise: ‘I’m just a human with a problem’

Gabriel Luna in Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy.

“It’s a huge reason why I was excited to accept the role. I was actually coming off The Last of Us, I was in the last week of shooting that when my team had said Patrick has offered this role that he had, in fact, written for me,” Luna tells SCREEN in an exclusive interview. “I just kept saying to them leading up to this that I just want to do a story where I’m just a human with a problem,” he adds, grinning.

“Just having played so many invulnerable characters — of course, including the robotic killing machine (in Terminator: Dark Fate) and The Ghost Rider, who’s already dead. There’s The Last of Us, where Tommy is clearly a very capable warrior and hero. I was just excited to play a man with a family that he cares about, and a job that he has to do which has its own troubles and trials,” confesses Luna.

Gabriel Luna as Ghost Rider in Agents of SHIELD.

But Luna doesn’t play the titular role in Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy. That would’ve been another mythological character, in this case a modern myth, on similar lines of the characters he wanted a break from. Instead, he plays Detective Rafael Tovar, the investigating officer of the infamous string of murders. In the first episode, we see him taking care of his little son as his wife, also a cop, comes back from her night duty. They embrace and kiss, before he takes over the baton and leaves for his day job.

“With those other characters, it’s about the physicality and geometry. I found that this one was really about just connecting with real, personal elements of what all these characters were doing. It involved just getting back to the roots, be present, be human, and respond accordingly,” says Luna.

The way Patrick shot the show also helped immensely. Luna refers to it as a “theatrical troupe in the traditional sense.” “The whole shoot was wonderful. We had three weeks of rehearsals. For most part, everybody just stayed together. Nobody retreated to their trailer. So yeah, it’s the usage of muscles we always had, especially when we started out as actors,” says Luna, smiling.

Another draw for him towards Devil in Disguise was the sensitivity with which Patrick approached the show. No murders are shown on the screen despite it being the story of a real-life serial killer. “I appreciated Patrick’s vision in what he was setting out to do and how he shaped the story, also for his own sake, so that he could sleep at night and live with himself for doing something of this nature. It really was his way of approaching the story that appealed to Michael and me. It’s really what brought all of us into it,” says Luna.

Devil in Disguise is also not solely obsessed with Gacy. It doesn’t glorify the serial killer. Instead, it strikes a balance between the perpetrator and the victims through its parallel narratives, one focusing on the eccentric assassin and the other on the back stories of those who fell prey to him. “Some of these stories are pieced together by the personal experiences of those in our writers room. Gacy was just this through line that connects all of these people, and is the catalyst for a lot of their troubles,” points out Luna.

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In the era of streaming where bloodshed and depiction of gratuitous crimes aren’t just allowed, but in fact exploited as baits for perverse enjoyment, Devil in Disguise steers clear of any violence on screen. It tells a chilling story, but not with the crutches of sensationalism that countless true crime shows are guilty of. “I think it was a really smart and courageous way of approaching this story because we’re not relying on  any sensational elements and the gruesome nature of these crimes. We were relying on the very personal connections between these people,” underlines Luna.