Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for the series finale, “The Man in the Glass,” of “Murdo: Death in the Family,” currently streaming on Hulu.
When it finally came time for Jason Clarke to play the moment Alex Murdaugh shoots his wife and son in Murdaugh: Death in the Family, he had already listened to and watched countless audition recordings, interview tapes, and archival footage of the man pulling the trigger. He always knew who was the loudest, most vibrant, colorful guy in the room.
“There’s an element of Tony Soprano in him,” Clark told Variety. “He’s an entertainer. He’s not a sad clown, he’s a happy clown!”
But while Clark is set in his South Carolina hometown and embodies the spectacle of a lawyer whose audience is his neighbors, there’s no such flashiness in the moment when Alex murders his wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette) and son Paul (Johnny Berchtold). He is calm and calculating. Clark strived to master that side of himself in the UCP series as well.
Courtesy of Disney/Daniel Delgado Jr.
“It means he has a lawyer inside of him, solving cases and going out to kill,” he says.
This scene originally played in Episode 6, and Alex was not in it. But as he lies in his cell in the finale, he reminisces about the night of the murder, and the scene takes its own path from Alex’s point of view. Before shooting the sequence, Clark had extensive discussions with co-producers Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr, director Steven Peete, and the local Atlanta crew about how the scene should develop and be shot. They knew the beats they had to hit. The scene begins as a mundane chore. When Maggie’s dog Bubba walks in with a dead chicken in its mouth, Paul records the conversation on Snapchat, and Alex is present at the scene, which ultimately led to the conviction. After the moment had passed, Alex walked away wearing his infamous blue raincoat, walked up to Paul with two guns in his hand, and shot him straight in the chest, then in the head. Maggie ran up to him and shot him in the leg and chest, then twice in the head. It would have happened quickly and Clarke didn’t want to waste any more time than necessary in this moment.
“I didn’t really want to do this all night,” he says of the shoot. “Pointing a gun at someone, even another actor in the scene, is never a good thing. And there was also a sense that this was one shot, because that’s all he got. It’s messy in its own way, and it’s over quickly. We had a sense of what it was like, and what always struck me was the simplicity of it in the end. There was no desire to put something there that wasn’t really there.”
But its inclusion in the series is important and powerful. After a series of documentaries on Netflix, HBO Max, CNN, ABC, NBC, and even a two-part Lifetime movie, the Murdaughs’ tragedy and the victims they left in their wake have been brutally dissected in the four years since their murders. But none of those reports showed the murder scene where Alex actually kills his family as viscerally as “Death in the Family.” This is what prosecutor Clayton Waters detailed at Alex’s trial in 2023. But for Clark, without any doubts about his role, watching it unfold was most important.
“That’s the main point of doing this work,” he says of the series. “That’s the point of bringing this up. Waters refuted it in court in a legal sense, and we, as playwrights, refuted it on screen.”
He also had one request for how it should play out. “It was important for me to make eye contact with Paul, because I think I would have, even if just for a moment,” he says.
That moment of realization by Paul, which Arquette also has to play as Maggie runs to see her husband standing over their son’s lifeless body, made the entire filming process a somber affair. “Paul saw it coming on that second shot and Maggie saw her son on the ground and it’s terrifying knowing the last person she saw was Alex,” Kerr says. “It was a very quiet night on set when we shot it.”
Disney/Courtesy of Wilford Harewood
But for Mr. Fuller and Mr. Kerr, there was also the question of when. When did Alex decide to kill Maggie and Paul? The show can’t answer that because no one knows. Was it a few days ago or a few weeks ago? Or was it the moment when Maggie tells Alex that she can’t trust anything he says, as seen in episode 6, or was it the moment later when mother and son are spotted sharing a tender moment on the porch at his expense?
“What I hope these episodes explain is that all of these moments could have been when he chose to do it, and Jason plays it so beautifully where he doesn’t give it up,” Kerr says.
For Carr, it was the moment when Maggie’s sister Marion (J. Smith Cameron) took the stand and spoke about the premeditation of the crime that really solidified the timeline. That’s why they included her testimony in the finale.
“The most revealing part of the true story was that when Marion took the stand, Alex said to her, ‘I think whoever did this was thinking about it for a long time,'” Kerr says. “That felt very strange to her. And for those of us who researched it and dramatized it, that’s what I truly believe.”
The series as a whole also had a mission to give Maggie and Paul more depth and humanity. By the time the nation learned of the Murdow family’s many dark secrets, they were already dead and unable to tell their stories. Paul, in particular, is also known for crashing a boat while drunk and killing teenager Mallory Beach in 2019, and this legal situation only exacerbated Alex’s financial and opiate addiction problems. Mr. Fuller, a native of South Carolina, fought hard to adapt Mandy Matney’s Murdaugh Murder Podcast as an original story because he wanted to be close to his home state and the people involved in the story. He also wanted Maggie and Paul to be more than just victims in the pictures endlessly disseminated by the media and plastered on courtroom posters, even if their stories were complicated by issues of collusion and wrongdoing.
“What we wanted to portray with them is that they have complexity, and especially in our version, that there’s good in that, too,” Fuller says. “Grace, guilt, and the search for answers.”
One way to do that was in a reflective moment in Episode 6, right before their deaths, where we imagine them having a heart-to-heart about why it’s not their job to save Alex from himself. Maggie had begun the process of breaking up with Alex, only returning to town to support him at his request as her father’s health deteriorated. Meanwhile, Paul begins to accept and process his guilt over Mallory’s death and begins to focus on his family and his future.
“There may or may not have been an avenue for them to really have that mother-son bond, but whatever it was, they were robbed of that opportunity,” Fuller says of the scene, which he co-wrote. “This is a moment of growth. It’s not a full-fledged breakthrough. It’s not a moment where everything makes sense now. But it was an opportunity to ask what would have happened if they hadn’t been tragically killed.”
Although he wanted to show the complexity of the Murdow family story, Carr is clear about how he views Maggie and Paul.
“From my perspective, they were victims of Alex Murdaugh,” Kerr added. “Whether people had feelings about her being a bad mother or what Paul did, they were killed in cold blood.”
If Clark’s opinion of the case changed during the production process, he says it’s because of the show’s commitment to shining more light on Alex’s victims.
“I feel like I got to know more about Paul and Maggie’s characters and their community,” he said, noting that he quietly visited the Hamptons before filming began. “Two days after Maggie and Paul were killed,[attorney]Mark Tinsley called Alex and said he was going to drop the case against the family on behalf of the Beaches. It was really heartbreaking because they didn’t think it was the right thing to do in lieu of what he was going through. But I also admire that. This is what humans are supposed to do. It made it all more real, and it made me care about everyone more.”
Clark still speaks at length about his thoughts on the case, the trial, and the uproar surrounding the story. If you ask him, he’ll tell you what mistakes he thinks the defense made at trial, what shouldn’t have been admitted in the case, and what parts of Alex’s testimony on the stand he wanted to play out on the show. It is clear that it is not an exaggeration to say that he has done his homework. He didn’t intend to imitate this man completely, but he wanted people who knew the case and felt they knew Alex to grab onto something recognizable, especially in the final episode when Alex took the stand in his own defense.
“It was a very special kickoff for his self-defense, so we created it exactly like him,” says Clark. “In that moment, he did indeed lean back and in another moment he smacked his lips. When he saw Buster in the bleachers, we were going to take a timeout because he was timing Buster in it at very odd times. But… People keep coming back because they’ve seen this trial and these videos over and over again. I strongly believe that if you hit on certain things, people will lean more toward the issues that we’re addressing, for lack of a better word.”
He was proud to hear directly from Matney himself that Clark had done such a good job that someone who knew the real Alex thought he might have gotten him out of prison to play him. But from being immersed in the world of the Murdaugh family, one thing has stayed with him forever. The Murdaugh family’s habit of always addressing everyone as “Bo” has seeped into Australians’ own vocabulary since the shooting, much to the chagrin of people like his son.
“My family was with me during filming, and my son said, ‘Dad, can you please stop saying that? I don’t like that,'” Clark says with a laugh. “I’m in Australia now and I called a guy ‘Bo’ the other day, which to us is like ‘bro’, but he just looked at me confused. I still love that word, I really do. ”
