'No Man Of God' Tasks Elijah Wood With Interviewing Ted Bundy
Elijah Wood will face Ted Bundy in No Man of God, a new thriller from writer C. Robert Cargill and director Amber Sealey. The story will focus on Bill Hagmaier, an FBI agent who interviewed the notorious serial killer on death row. Hagmaier was featured prominently in the Netflix docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.
Deadline has the details on No Man of God, a new film that will see Elijah Wood playing FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier. The film is "set largely in a single interrogation room" and will be based on "real-life transcripts culled from conversations between FBI analyst Bill Hagmaier (Wood) and serial killer Bundy that took place between 1984 and 1989." The movie will also detail "the complicated relationship that formed between the two men during Bundy's final years on death row." You can actually listen to some of the recordings of Bundy and Hagmaier's conversations here, should you be so inclined.
Amber Sealey will direct from a script by Sinister writer C. Robert Cargill. Elijah Wood, Daniel Noah, Lisa Whalen, and Kim Sherman are producing. Scott Derrickson, Bill Hagmaier, Stacy Jorgensen, and Mark Ward are executive producers. No one has been cast as Bundy yet. Wood continues to be one of those actors willing to take risks, and Cargill is a strong writer, so I'm very interested to see how this turns out.
More than 30 years after his execution, Bundy remains a figure who continues to fascinate. Last year saw the release of the Netflix docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes – which drew on the conversations between Bundy and Hagmaier – which was then followed by the Netflix movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Zac Efron as Bundy. Earlier this year, Amazon released the docuseries Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, which focused less on Bundy and more on his victims, and Bundy's long-term girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall.
"The first time I met Ted Bundy, he was on death row already," the real Hagmaier said. "During the first meeting, he said, 'Why should I talk to you, and not somebody else?' I said, 'Because I'm here to learn.' And he said, 'Would you kill me?' And I said, 'Well...I wouldn't take a whole lot of satisfaction, and if it was my job, and you're asking me if I'd pull the switch...I think about all these girls, so yeah, I'd do it,' and he said, 'Okay, well, we can understand each other now.'"