Primetime: The Real Decoy Dan Behind Skyler Gisondo's Role

Skyler Gisondo plays a fictionalized version of Dan Schrack, the actor NBC paid to lure predators on camera, in Lance Oppenheim's new Robert Pattinson film.

Robert Pattinson is playing Chris Hansen. But the character carrying the film's conscience is someone most people watching To Catch a Predator never learned the name of.

A24's Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim and out in theatres from September 25, rebuilds NBC's old predator-hunting show around Hansen and, around the young decoy who baited the men into showing up on camera. In the film he's called Dan Plumb, played by Skyler Gisondo. In real life he was Dan Schrack, an aspiring actor with a musical theatre background and, before this, a Toys R Us commercial as his biggest credit.

Schrack answered a casting call thinking he'd signed up for reenactments. What he got instead was live, unscripted work, posing online and on the phone as a minor to lure targets to decoy houses in Fort Myers, Petaluma and, most notoriously, Murphy, Texas. He's credited across seven episodes of the original show and was paid a reported USD 5,000 a shoot. That number, along with his Toys R Us past and the deliberately young, nervy cadence he used on decoy calls, all comes straight from journalist Luke Dittrich's 2007 Esquire piece on the show, the same reporting Primetime is built on.

The Murphy sting is the one that shadows him still. Schrack was the decoy who made contact with Rockwall County assistant district attorney Bill Conradt, and the operation ended with Conradt dying by suicide as police and the Dateline crew arrived at his house. Schrack has spoken about the weight of that since. In a 2025 interview with Entertainment Weekly, he said, "You could offer me USD 10 million to film that episode in Texas again. I wouldn't take it."

He left the decoy work behind entirely after the show ended, and went the long way round into journalism instead, producing in Buffalo, anchoring in Elmira, and joining Rochester's 13WHAM News in June 2019, where he still works as a news anchor and does comedy on the side. He isn't credited or promoted anywhere in Primetime's official material, and the film changes his surname from Schrack to Plumb specifically to mark the distance between the man and the character.

Oppenheim's version of him isn't a hero and isn't a villain either. He's written as a gig actor who takes the job for the steady pay and the proximity to a national broadcast, then starts questioning what exactly he's being asked to perform once the calls turn into confrontations. Phoebe Bridgers plays Del, a character drawing on real decoy Del Harvey, running a parallel version of that same unease. Both arcs build toward the Conradt sequence, which the film treats as its ethical breaking point rather than a plot twist.

What Primetime doesn't do is resolve the question it raises about Hansen's format itself, whether confronting men on camera for ratings was ever separable from the entrapment it depended on. That's presumably left for audiences walking out of the September 25 release to argue about on their own.