Bill Pullman has long been one of the most versatile actors in America, not only given the breadth and depth of his performances but also the variety of forms in which he skillfully operates; he’s delivered iconic work in noir (“Lost Highway“), sci-fi spectacle (“Independence Day“), romantic comedy (“Sleepless in Seattle”), Westerns (“Wyatt Earp”), and horror (“The Serpent and the Rainbow”), among many other genres. With last year’s Lifetime film “Murdaugh Murders: The Movie,” Pullman added true crime to his résumé, and the result was not only one of the best movies ever to air on that network (“Murdaugh Murders” was the 500th Lifetime Original Movie) but one of Pullman’s most surprising performances — surprising both in the depth he found in a murderer most of us know as a tabloid journalism caricature, and in the way Pullman suppressed and obliterated his own natural nice guy charm to disappear into the character.
Related Stories
‘Dead Boy Detectives’ Showrunner on Why Edwin Had to Confess His Love in Hell
Nicole Kidman Was So ‘Pissed Off’ While Filming ‘Big Little Lies’ That She Threw a Rock Through a Window
Although Pullman has shown his dark side before in movies like “Lost Highway” and “Surveillance,” “Murdaugh Murders” represented an additional degree of difficulty in that the actor had to emulate a figure well known to millions of people — though not, ironically, to Pullman himself. When his agents sent him the script, he had no idea who Alex Murdaugh, the South Carolina attorney found guilty of murdering his wife and son, was and wasn’t particularly interested in playing him. “Then I read the script, and there was something in the dialogue,” Pullman told an audience at a recent American Cinematheque event honoring his work. “It turns out that a lot of it came from transcriptions.” Pullman credited screenwriter Michael Vickerman with skillfully incorporating real-life dialogue from Murdaugh’s case and recreating its rhythms in scenes that were fictionalized. “The scenes all kept that tenor, that crazy syntax, and I started to take a look at that and thought this would be a good journey. We had to do it fast, but it would be worthwhile.”
When Pullman says that the filmmakers had to work fast, he’s not kidding. Due to an impending SAG strike, Pullman had less than 10 days to prep for the role, and the movie itself had a shooting schedule of around 30 days — a race against the clock for a three-hour film of its scale and ambition. Pullman gave himself a crash course in all things Alex Murdaugh by diving into archival footage and studying the killer’s dialect and body language. While Pullman’s external transformation is complete and stunning — it comes as a real shock to the system for anyone who remembers Pullman from his affable “While You Were Sleeping” and “The Accidental Tourist” roles — what really interested the actor was the character’s internal contradictions. “I had a conversation with [director] Greg Beeman before we started, and asked him, ‘Did Alex love his wife and son?’ He said, ‘Absolutely,’ and I thought, that’s the paradox. That’s what we’re investigating.”
For Pullman, the trick was to play Alex’s contradictions without revealing more than the real Murdaugh did since, as Pullman notes, he had everyone around him fooled. “The people that were around him for all these years never saw anything that was there underneath the surface,” Pullman said. “And these were not dumb people. They just believed he was their lifelong friend and a fun guy to hang out with.” Over the course of the movie, Murdaugh’s appearance changes considerably, something Pullman had to suggest in the way he carried himself, given that the tight schedule meant he didn’t have time to gain or lose a considerable amount of weight. Working in close collaboration with the wardrobe designer as well as his hair and make-up artists, Pullman managed to give the impression that his body had completely transformed even though the effect is often just a sleight-of-hand of movement and costuming.
Although Pullman acknowledges that he would have liked more time to delve further into his character, he ultimately feels that the modest budget and fast speed of the “Murdaugh Murders” shoot created its own kind of enthusiasm among the cast and crew. “The director was really collaborative, and it was a very young crew that gave 110 percent,” Pullman said. “I think some of that was them asking, ‘Can we really pull this off?’ That created this little incubator where we were going really fast but feeling confident that we were getting something.” In the end, Pullman is grateful not only that the movie came out as well as it did but that people are discovering it amidst the vast sea of content currently available on television and streaming platforms. “I’m very thankful to have this movie looked at, because there’s definitely a lot of production out there. But you know, sometimes you get a certain kind of pitch, and you can hear the bat hit it, and it cracks. And I felt like this was a movie like that.”
