There may be more serial killer screen performances in movies and TV than there are actual serial killers, and yet Paul Walter Hauser’s turn in Black Bird is one for the ages. What the 35-year-old actor is doing in Dennis Lehane’s six-part Apple TV+ miniseries—the penultimate episode debuts Friday—is nothing short of astounding, putting a creepily new spin on a familiar archetype to fashion an indelible portrait of deviant evil. Even in a sea of maniacal villains, his Larry Hall stands out as a uniquely cunning madman, so unpredictable and unnerving as to be downright unforgettable.
Based on James Keene and Hillel Levin’s non-fiction book In With The Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, and A Dangerous Bargain for Redemption, Black Bird concerns Keene (Taron Egerton), a young and cocky 1990s gun-runner who’s given an opportunity to escape his ten-year jail sentence by the FBI. They convince him to enter a maximum-security prison in order to cozy up to Hall (Hauser), who’s behind bars for the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl.
Hall confessed to that slaying, but his history of lying—and taking credit for crimes he didn’t commit—threatens to derail his conviction and free him on appeal. The feds want Keene to get Hall to cop to his homicide, as well as the others they suspect he’s committed, thus requiring Keene to befriend a pedophilic sociopath and coax him into giving up his secrets, most of which he likes to talk about and then claim are his “dreams.”
It's a thrilling real-life scenario, and one that Lehane and company dramatize with suspenseful dynamism, especially a sterling Egerton, Greg Kinnear and Sepideh Moafi as the investigators on Hall’s trail, and the late Ray Liotta as Keene’s ailing father (in his final performance). The star of the show, however, is Hauser, the accomplished character-actor vet of I, Tonya, BlacKkKlansman, Richard Jewell, Cruella, and Cobra Kai, whose Hall proves a lunatic like no other.
With a mop of tussled dark hair and giant burnsides (i.e., sideburns) sprouting from his cheeks—a style born from his love of Civil War reenactments—the portly Hall has the look of an unkempt misfit, and that impression is reinforced by his breathy, high-pitched, quasi-falsetto voice. Hauser often speaks slowly and haltingly, making Hall sound like a spacey child lost in a distant fugue (or deranged erotic reverie), only to then suddenly speed up his vocal cadence when he becomes excited by a topic of particular note. Moreover, his words have a tendency to trail off at a moment’s notice, his mouth hanging slightly open in the disturbing, unnatural way that a cat’s sometimes does, his tongue moving back and forth in the gaping space.
Chuckling in a bizarre kid-ish manner, and then cutting off that laughter as quickly as it begins, Hall is a man-child who moves freely between lucidity and irrationality, honesty and deception, naivete and shrewdness. Furthermore, Hauser complements Hall’s weirdo tenor with disquieting glares and mannerisms. When confused, upset or struck by an enticing notion or memory, his eyes become squinty, but he also has a habit of shooting Kubrick stares during instances of heightened intensity.
The effect is to imbue Hall—a former janitor whose professional adeptness is at odds with his social ineptitude—with an alien aura, equal parts juvenile and calculating, and his interactions with Egerton’s Keene are marked by riveting volatility; one second, Hall is using the term “mommy” à la a five-year-old, and the next he’s perceptively probing and dissecting his new buddy’s pain and trauma.
While Hauser embodies Hall via a variety of strange mannerisms, they’re so deeply lived-in that they feel not like look-at-me theatrics but, rather, like the attributes of a terribly unhinged maniac. That all comes to a head in a late third-episode conversation between Hall and Keene about sex, during which the former asks the latter if he’s ever slept with a “wet” woman. Upon hearing that Keene has, Hall gets all stimulated and titters, “I think you’re making it up.”
Pressed about his own conjugal experiences, Hall’s eyes go narrow, his mouth droops ajar, and he states, “I just kinda….I just kinda jam it in.” Even more unsettling, upon Keene beginning to tell a story about a partner who remained well-lubricated even though she wasn’t enjoying how their tryst was going, Hall’s pupils light up and his body suddenly wriggles with delight, as if jolted by an electric current. “I don’t believe you, but go on,” the homicidal rapist says with eager perversity, Hauser vacillating on a dime between guarded and exposed, credulous and canny, inquisitive and inhuman.
Whether staring at a wall like a cold, lifeless mannequin or exhibiting traces of sincere interest in Keene (and his friendship), Hauser makes Hall a mesmerizingly idiosyncratic serial killer, one whose dark urges are on the surface for all to see, and yet simultaneously buried deep beneath layers of fabrications, half-truths and fantasies—a duality that extends to his sleepy-yet-coiled energy, and his dim-witted-yet-crafty intellect. From the get-go, there’s little question that Hall is guilty of that which he’s accused.
Still, Hauser’s wicked evasiveness keeps everything in doubt, and on extreme edge. Intimidating and haunting precisely because it’s so difficult to pin down, the actor’s performance is a tour-de-force of slippery psychosexual menace. It’s the chief reason to seek out Black Bird (which, spoiler alert, sticks the landing) – and, also, proof that Hauser is one of the medium’s true must-watch artists.
