Zac Efron Is Bringing Sexy Ted Bundy Back

EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE will tell the story of the infamous serial killer, and will once again make him inexplicably hot.

By May. 16, 2017

One of the things that's always bugged me about the Ted Bundy story was how often he was described as "handsome" or a "hunk." On his best day Bundy was a kind of gangly, normal-looking blando, and I guess in the 1970s finding out that a serial killer could hold a day job and dress himself and walk among us undetected was sort of novel. Somewhere along the way, after a few true crime novels and a Mark Harmon TV-movie portrayal or two, Ted Bundy's banal guy-next-door thing transmogrified into "sexy." Okay, fine.

If you say so.

Anyway, I bring up his sexiness because this week brings word that Perfect Human Specimen Zac Efron will be playing Bundy in director Joe Berlinger's Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. The film will recount the Ted Bundy story through the eyes of Bundy's longtime girlfriend, so maybe that's why he's...idealized to the point of looking like Zac Efron? Or maybe Efron will undergo a Charlize Theron-in-Monster-type transformation, but given the aforementioned apocryphal "hunkiness" of Bundy, I wouldn't bet on it.

This is one of those Black List scripts (penned by Michael Werwie) that everyone's always buzzing about, so it's probably the real deal. And Joe Berlinger is, in this writer's opinion, one of the great documentarians of our time. (He also helmed Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, so YMMV.) And Efron is a talented young man, no two ways about it. This is a project to be excited about. The "Sexy Bundy" thing just grates, though. Dude was a creep.  

Not to toot my own fancasting horn, but after two seasons of Documentary Now! and The Skeleton Twins, there's no doubt in my mind who could have nailed this role. 

I also want to point out that there's a stylish, mean little DTV Ted Bundy biopic out there from director Matthew Bright (Freeway) from 2002 that's worth checking out if you're into this sort of thing. 

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