As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is once again diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.

THE CHARACTER: HOLDEN FORD, MINDHUNTER

If you’ve seen classic David Fincher films like Seven, Zodiac, or even The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you know the infamously exacting director has a type: the obsessive who tries to solve a crime in the library or the archives, nimbly combing through databases and warehouses full of forgotten evidence. The Fincher obsessive starts their work unblemished—but by the end, it has upended their lives.

In the case of Fincher’s 10-episode Netflix series Mindhunter, that obsessive is Holden Ford, played by Tony-nominated actor Jonathan Groff. Holden starts as a textbook Groff character: neat, bookish, pretty, an F.B.I. choirboy who becomes a teacher and researcher after a hostage situation goes wrong. But soon, alongside behavioral scientist Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and anthropologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), Holden falls down the rabbit hole of a new line of thinking about killers, one that brings him a little too close to the murderers themselves.

Mindhunter tracks two things at once: the rise of F.B.I. profiling, and Holden’s own revolution. As his work bleeds into his life—leading to both a sexual awakening and growing megalomania—so too does his ability to understand the likes of real-life killers like Ed Kemper and Richard Speck. It’s a show about criminal minds, and its most exhilarating suggestion—as uncannily and subtly performed by Groff—is that by vicariously understanding them, Boy Scout Holden risks becoming the thing he studies. Mindhunter is implicitly a show about crime shows, one that trains its eye on everything police procedurals take for granted—the concept of criminal profiling, above all, and the ability to crack a case by trying to reconstruct the mind of a killer. Holden is at the vanguard of that new method—and his insights are both its best-case scenario and, as Holden’s megalomania grows, a nightmarish display of everything at risk.

How He Came To Life

According to Groff, everything we see on Mindhunter—from Holden’s plainspoken, unimpeachable professionalism to his sexual and ethical transformation—was present in the script, as early as his audition. “All the ten episodes had been written before we started,” he said. At the audition, he was given scenes from every episode, and told to chart Holden’s emotional and behavioral turns on the spot.

“The scenes that they gave me were these sort of Mormon-y, sort of buttoned up, earnest, milk-drinking FBI agent,” he said. “And then all of a sudden in these other scenes, as it went along, he was mirroring serial killers—like, the tactics in order to get them to open up were him mirroring them, and talking in a slight southern accent.”

Fincher must have been as impressed by what didn’t change in that audition as he was by what did. “He always talks about how he casts people based on the essence that they bring naturally,” said Groff. “It’s just who they are as a person.” He’s also a director known for having his actors perform several takes, doing the same lines over and over until all the artifice is gone and the performance feels natural—because what comes naturally is what will persist through every scene and every take, no matter the conditions. “If we are working late hours and we are tired and whatever,” said Groff, “this quality will still be there. It’s the quality you can’t beat out of someone.”