Teri Hatcher on Humanizing ‘The Ruth Finley Story’ for Lifetime

Teri Hatcher is no stranger to sinister happenings that lurk underneath the surface of an otherwise idyllic life — after all, she’s best known for the eight seasons she spent playing girl next door Susan Mayer on Desperate Housewives. But the actress experienced a career first when she stepped into the dark world of Ruth Finley in, The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story, a movie inspired by actual events.

Lifetime

“It was the first time that I ever played a real person in a true story,” she says of Finley, a quiet housewife from Wichita who made headlines in 1978 as the subject of a stalking case following her husband Ed’s (Battlestar Galactica’s Tahmoh Penikett) heart attack. With the possibility that her threats are linked to the area’s notorious BTK serial killer, Finley’s paranoia becomes rampant as investigators attempt to figure out the truth.

Calling the film “spectacularly crazy and compelling,” Hatcher says she “really tried to humanize Finley and her experience.” That included some personal input when it came time to translate Finley’s physical looks to the screen.“Because we were playing between the late 1970s and the early ’80s, I did pull up a shot of me from The Love Boat in 1985 so that we could look at the hair,” says Hatcher, who in addition to her past life as an NFL cheerleader was a dancer on the ABC series from 1985 to 1986.

Fortunately, her next role is a little less intense: She’ll voice a robot caregiver in Apple TV+’s WondLa, premiering June 28. “The story takes place in a sort of apocalyptic Earth,” previews Hatcher. “It’s like Alice in Wonderland, but instead of going down the rabbit hole, you’re going up to the surface and traveling this crazy, sometimes scary, sometimes beautiful land that has all these different kinds of creatures and beings. The animation is gorgeous!”

The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story, Movie Premiere, Saturday, June 29, 8/7c, Lifetime