Why did they ask a good guy like Bill Pullman to play a monstrous murderer, convicted of murdering his wife and son, in Lifetime's ripped-from-the-headlines two-part miniseries, “Murdaugh Murders: The Movie?”
“I kept thinking maybe it was because they anticipated I'd look good with red hair,” the warm, cool Pullman jokes during an early spring interview in Los Angeles.
But a change in hair color was only a small part of the actor's deft transformation to evoke Alex Murdaugh, the South Carolina attorney and scion of a prominent legal family, currently serving two consecutive life sentences in prison. state for the 2021 double homicide. (He was also sentenced to 40 years for financial fraud.)
Curtis Tweedie, as the murdered son of Alex Murdaugh, played by Bill Pullman, in “Murdaugh Murders: The Movie.”
(Lifetime)
Not that the Pullman dye didn't initially worry the veteran actor. “The makeup and hair in the movie took me to a [suburban Vancouver] mall where there was a beauty salon and I thought, 'My God, how did this happen?'” she says with a wry smile. “But they did an excellent job.”
Although he is perhaps best known for his affectionate or heroic roles in films such as “Sleepless in Seattle,” “While You Were Sleeping” and “Independence Day,” a review of his approximately 100 screen credits reminds us that his career has been punctuated by with much darker parts. These include serial killers in both the BBC One/Starz series “Torchwood: Miracle Day” and the 2008 Jennifer Lynch film “Surveillance,” as well as a detective with a disturbing side in the USA Network anthology series “ “The Sinner.”
“It was the same thing when I did 'Lost Highway,'” Pullman recalls of the surreal 1997 thriller, in which he played a murder suspect. “When they asked [director/co-writer] David Lynch, 'Why Did You Choose Bill?' he said, 'His eyes of him.' He seems like a guy who could get into a lot of trouble.'” (Pullman astutely admits that he has had some “heartbreaking moments” in real life.)
Still, Pullman initially had misgivings about playing Murdaugh in the fast-paced production competing against last year's looming actors' strike. “I think I probably had eight days to prepare,” Pullman says, “and the first two were spent saying, 'I don't want to do this,' because I just hadn't followed through. [the Murdaugh story], had no information. The only thing he knew was that he killed his wife and his son.”
But that changed once he finally read Michael Vickerman's script, which combines transcripts of actual courtroom testimony, dash cam footage, and Murdaugh's 911 call. “I was intrigued by the text of the script,” Pullman says. “I could sense that something really unusual was happening in the thought process when you actually wrote things down as they were said. “Many things are revealed in that.”
Talking about the character with the film's director, Greg Beeman, also helped. “I said, 'I have a feeling that the basis of all this is that Alex loved his wife and he loved his son.' Greg said that was his feeling too. So I thought, 'Okay, that's a premise we can start with, it's going to be valuable.' It's a paradox.'”
The actor considers having all those Murdaugh tapes to study “a blessing and a curse” and discovered that he had to get out of “the weeds” to begin inhabiting the role. It was then, just before filming began, that another key idea occurred to him: he still had to take on the role.
Bill Pullman has played troubled men in more roles than you might expect.
(Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)
“You realize everyone's been watching this [coverage of the Murdaugh case] and they will want a mirror,” Pullman says. “I told Greg that, just to give me some slack and space, he wasn't going to do an impersonation, which meant he wasn't going to stand there and say, 'Oh, [Murdaugh] He didn't turn left when he said that, he turned right. And Greg agreed.”
Although the actor was inspired by Murdaugh's abundant images, he also did not attempt to duplicate the disgraced lawyer's Southern inflection. “I don't think he has that specific accent,” Pullman explains. “Nowadays more urban people live in Piedmont. Nobody comes out of the hills doing those big things with their backs. And he adds: “But how surprising it was to have so much material to base something on. “I’ve never had anything like that before.”
And how did Pullman channel the atrocity of his character, who was a habitual liar, a drug addict, an embezzler and, ultimately, a murderer? “Well, I think he's a guy who says, 'I can handle anything,' so he's the perfect candidate to form a big storm cloud when he doesn't know it's going to rain, and it does,” the actor says. “Like suicide, he has some psychiatric patterns. You read a little about brain chemistry and you notice those arcs of mania and depression that Murdoch pursued while he used [oxycodone] pills to stay above the darkness… that people can present as competent… until they aren't.”
Pullman concludes: “That's all interesting stuff. You can't do that playing a good guy. But it makes you want to do a comedy next.”
