by Gill Pringle in LA
Australia’s own Jason Clarke has played many characters in a career spanning four decades, but his latest role as disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh – convicted for killing his own wife and son – he describes as terrifying.
“I mean, look, horrified and enjoyable, is basically it,” Clarke says candidly, when we ask how he felt about portraying Murdaugh in crime drama series Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
“I was terrified of playing a 265-pound redheaded South Carolinan who ends up where he ends up on that 911 call. There’s something very traumatizing even just listening to that call – and I listened to it a lot,” says Clarke, 56, referring to the excruciating emergency call Murdaugh made to police on the night that his wife and son were shot and killed.
“It reminded me of The Sopranos where it’s not about the gangsters, it’s about the family,” suggests the actor who stars opposite Patricia Arquette as the sleazy lawyer’s now deceased wife Maggie Murdaugh.
“I thought it took away the benefit of hindsight and put us into it, and you understood – which actually magnified the tragedy – not the horror of it, of this family, this husband, this wife, this long-running family in the South, good and bad, and this community that they came from that was just torn asunder by the events that unfolded, and then, as you discover, the man himself,” says Clarke who is also currently starring in Katheryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite.
“But he was a father. He loved his children. He loved his wife. And they loved him. And he committed the most heinous betrayal that you’re going to come across – it’s Shakespearean.”
As Maggie and Alex Murdaugh, the couple enjoyed a lavish life of privilege as members of one of South Carolina’s most powerful legal dynasties. But when their son Paul is involved in a deadly boat crash, Alex’s stature is tested. As details come to light, the family’s connections to several mysterious deaths raise serious questions, threatening everything that the Murdaughs hold dear.
If Maggie Murdaugh had been willing to turn a blind eye to her husband’s cheating and philandering, then even she is blind-sided as the depths of her husband’s depravity unfurl.
“It was like, ‘what did he do? Wait, what? And what’s the next thing that’s being revealed, and he did this and he stole that and he lied to this person? Wait, he was there?’” says Arquette.
“It was like all of these layers of discovery. But when you tell a story or you live with a person in your community or someone in your family, it’s not just that he shot his wife and son. There’s a lot that goes around that,” says the Oscar-winning actress discussing her deep dive into all-things-Murdaugh for the series inspired by the popular Murdaugh Murders podcast.
Co-executive produced by award-winning journalist Mandy Matney, who launched the original true-crime podcast, Arquette, 57, had plenty of resources in building her portrayal of Maggie Murdaugh.
“Mandy had this exhaustive podcast where she’d interviewed people and made these discoveries along the way and been tracking everything. To have that resource was amazing. But then also, looking at this family – how did the community come out of it going, ‘Who is this guy? No way. I know this guy. Hold on, we hung out, he was there. What’s going on?’
“And it’s the same way that she felt. Same way his kids felt, like ‘Who’s my dad? What is going on?’ That’s the interesting stuff to me, it’s like, yeah, there’s lies and it’s mixed in with love. And it’s also mixed in with protectiveness and deception. Gaslighting and betrayal,” she adds.
In the show, Clarke is almost unrecognisable beneath his strawberry blonde hair, good ol’ boy southern accent, double chins and beer belly.
“There were a few times where people on set would say, ‘Oh my God, my father or I knew Alec.’ And there were a couple of extras that were really freaked out,” recalls the actor.
“I freaked myself out. Once I got over the initial fear of what this was going to be, it was just ‘Jump in, man.’”
Clarke underwent his transformation without even leaning on the usual prosthetics or padding for a role like this.
“I just needed to eat a lot,” he says, with the emphasis on ‘a lot.’ “I needed to destroy my metabolism and put on a lot of weight.
“That was the first thing. And then I put it together brick by brick. I wanted to make sure that I got this very complicated man right. I knew it was going to be a monster time once we got to set, so I needed to be very prepared so that it didn’t fall apart.
“I listened to him before I started watching. I put together his mind and the trial and the way that he defended himself in those two days he spent on the stand, which were fascinating. And then, you just start to work with the dialect, and then when I got together with Ms. Arquette, we put together our relationship.
“There were long, long days – but we managed to have a lot of fun too, putting together the grist or the texture and the fabric . . . the silk between what makes a couple a couple and a relationship that humanises and then exacerbates the horror of what he did in the end,” Clarke says.
For Arquette, she recognised many of the tropes of alcoholism or addiction and how that impacts families.
“I grew up with an alcoholic household, untreated for many, many years, so there were certain dynamics that I had seen, and I loved my dad – and my dad adored me,” she says of her late actor father Lewis Arquette. “But he was charming and he was a baby and he was manipulative and he gaslit my mom and he was a cheater, and he didn’t get his needs met and that was a priority.
“Looking at those mechanisms … and I don’t think I’m alone, and I don’t think Maggie’s alone and I don’t think this family is alone. There’s a lot of dynamics in dysfunctional families that I think are predictive patterns,” says the Severance actress whose siblings – Rosanna, Richmond, Alexis and David – would also became actors.
“There’s just a lot of pain in this, not just for Maggie waking up to who maybe he is, and she never even knew it all. I don’t think any of us will ever know it all. This is like the tip of the iceberg. But the community was also heartbroken with, like, ‘Wait a minute. I know this guy, I love this guy. What are you telling me? How could he have done this?’” she says.
In March 2023, Murdaugh was found guilty of the 2021 murders of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul.
Jurors deliberated for less than three hours before delivering their guilty verdict – Murdaugh receiving two consecutive life sentences in prison, in addition to 40 years behind bars for his financial crimes.
Murdaugh: Death in the Family is streaming now on Disney+
