2 Guys From Chicago

What a pair. Just about the nicest couple of guys you’d want to take a ride with--Billy Zane and Dennis Farina, a.k.a. this weekend as, respectively, Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono.

Not so nice guys.

“There’s nothing redeeming about him at all,” says Farina, the veteran actor who plays serial killer Buono in Sunday’s NBC movie “Blood Brothers: The Hillside Stranglers” (review by Howard Rosenberg on Page 1). “There’s no way I could empathize with someone like that--no way. The only people I felt anything for were the victims, the families. I didn’t have to identify with Buono.”

“It was a great role,” Zane said cheerfully, of his part as Bianchi. “As an actor, I got to get away with murder.”

Zane, who appears in “Dead Calm,” a film opening Friday by Australian director Phillip Noyce, is one of those actors whose instincts have been right so far.

After attending the American School in Switzerland where he studied acting and writing for a year, Zane moved to Los Angeles and within three weeks, landed a role in the original “Back to the Future.” The Chicago native landed other parts in a string of films, did local theater and now has the double-play of a feature film and a TV film exposing him to the public within a week of each other.

Better know to audiences, one-time Chicago detective Farina has made a career of playing bad guys. He made his acting debut in 1980 in the Michael Mann film “Thief” and played a mob boss in the 1988 comedy, “Midnight Run.” Farina also has the recurring role on “Miami Vice” of Lombard, a bad guy with a noble soul.

All of whom, of course, pale against the sheer villainy of his “Strangler” role. “Let’s put it this way,” Farina says. “Buono is not the kind of guy I wanted to get to know too well.”