JANUARY 24, 2016 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, JANUARY 24, 2016, 1:21 AM
BY VIRGINIA ROHAN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Dying may be easy — from a theatrical standpoint — but playing dead can be oh-so-hard.
Just ask Glen Rock’s Charlie Sara, who portrayed murder victim Paul Duncsak in an Investigation Discovery show’s re-creation of one of Bergen County’s most notorious homicide cases. In 2006, Duncsak was ambushed inside his Ramsey home, a crime for which his former father-in-law was convicted.
“He murdered [him] in very close quarters in the entry foyer of his home, and it was close-range gunshots, six of them, one to the groin,” Sara recalls of one gruesome scene he shot, for a 2015 episode of the ID series “I’d Kill for You,” at a mansion in Sparta. “And then the hardest part was laying on a cold marble floor for about four hours as they shot camera angles of the dead body.”
Sara, a professionally trained actor who owns and operates an ambulatory-care facility in Paramus, has since played a prosecutor and a murderer in two different ID shows. He is a part of two intertwining television trends — the huge popularity of the true-crime genre and the rise of Sparta Township, a Sussex County community with one of New Jersey’s lowest crime rates, as a filming locale.
“It’s one of the safest communities, but it’s the set for the re-creations of some very heinous crimes from all over the
country,” says Sparta police Lt. John-Paul Beebe, who, along with local Realtor Duffy Brennan, is credited with igniting the filming boom a few years ago, as a way to pump up the local economy.