When the wife and son of prominent South Carolina attorney, Alex Murdaugh, were shot and killed in 2021, the news instantly captivated the public’s attention. Were they targets in an act of judicial revenge? Was the whole family in danger? Soon, the story went from tragic and shocking to bizarre as the police investigation closed in on Murdaugh himself as the perpetrator and the family’s deep-rooted influence came to light.
Hulu has dramatized the case in a new limited series, now streaming, called “Murdaugh: Death in the Family.” Jason Clarke stars as Murdaugh alongside Patricia Arquette as his wife, Maggie, and Johnny Berchtold and Will Harrison play sons Paul and Buster. The series is based on the reporting of local journalist Mandy Matney, who covered the case extensively in a podcast and is an executive producer. Brittany Snow plays Matney in the series.
Murdaugh is now spending the rest of his life in prison for the murders of his wife and son Paul. He’s also been convicted of financial crimes.
Mirror to the psyche
In preparing for his role as Murdaugh, Clarke found it helpful to first listen to audio from the trial and then watch it on video. “By listening to it, I was really able just to hear nothing but his voice and his thoughts and the tone. And I got a lot from that. I listened to it as if I was him.”
Clarke also used Alex’s size and alleged unhealthy diet as a mirror to his psyche. In many scenes, the character is eating.
“That stomach needed to be filled constantly,” said Clarke, who compared Murdaugh to “a great white shark. He can’t stop moving. He has to move. And that’s like physically, emotionally and psychologically.” Arquette interpreted his insatiable appetite as someone “starving to death.”
“You know, ‘I need that attention. I need your approval. I need you to like me. I need you to think I’m smart. I need some more money. I need love. I need drugs. I need this. I need to get something over on you. I need to trick somebody,” Arquette said.
An interest in human behavior
“Death in the Family” isn’t the first acting job Arquette has had based on a true crime. She also starred in “Escape at Dannemora” and “The Act” and says she’s “always been interested” in the genre and what leads people to make the choices they do.
“We have this weird species that does these things,” Arquette said. To learn more about Maggie, she turned to Matney’s research.
“She was able to give me little things,” explained Arquette. “What kind of makeup Maggie wore, what she would make for breakfast, and how she would carry her cash in a plastic bag in her purse. Just little idiosyncratic things.”
Arquette began to see Maggie as a supporting player to her family. “She loved a family photo like a trophy. ‘We made it. Here we are. Look at my beautiful family,’ but the videos I had access to, she’s the photographer, the support system. The documenter of everyone else’s life.”
Son Paul Murdaugh had his own legal troubles. In 2019. he was driving a boat that crashed into a local bridge and killed one of its passengers, Mallory Beach, and injured several others. He was charged with felony boating under the influence. Berchtold was intent on playing Paul as a three-dimensional person.
“I think when we consume true crime or we hear a case, we go, ‘OK, that’s the villain.’ It can be very black and white, of course, but that’s not life. That’s not humanity,” explained Berchtold. “There’s so much going on with him. Look at the environment he was raised in. Something that I really wanted to hold on to, that I found really fascinating, is there has been documentation of his personality and his friendliness and his heart, which I found really surprising when you just look at headlines.”
Power and influence
Co-creator and showrunner Michael D. Fuller grew up in South Carolina and immediately recognized the good ‘ol boys mentality ingrained in its culture, which is likely why the Murdaughs had so much power and influence for generations. He felt “a draw in wanting to dramatize and adapt it with as much reverence and responsibility and respect to the place and the people.”
Matney spent many sleepless nights diving deep into the Murdaughs. She sees the release of “Death in the Family” as the end of an era in her personal story but not to the Murdaugh’s web of corruption.
“It will never be over. We’ve all come to terms with that,” said Matney, citing the recent conviction and sentencing of Murdaugh associate Russell Laffitte for fraud related to the case. “A lot of what I went through while investigating this case was a dark chapter for me. For a while, I just didn’t want to talk about it. But now this has made me feel so positive about the experience, and it’s been like the best way to close this chapter of my life.”
There’s also hope that a takeaway for viewers could be about the importance of local journalism.
“A journalist can go up against the grain,” said Matney, “even if her boss is and everybody’s telling her not to. I think that that’s a story that people need to hear right now. And I think with a lot of media, it’s just really easy to fall into line and to do what they want you to do. But this is a story about not doing that and where you can go.”
