Bill Pullman (‘Murdaugh Murders: The Movie’) on playing a sociopath: ‘It’s nice to live on the other side every once in a while’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Bill Pullman probably isn’t the first actor you’d think would be cast to portray a drug-addicted sociopath who is convicted of killing his wife Maggie and son Paul, as he does playing Alex Murdaugh in the Lifetime two-part docudrama “Murdaugh Murders: The Movie.” This is, after all the same guy who played the heroic President of the U.S. in the 1996 blockbuster “Independence Day,” and his impressive career has found him playing an assortment of characters similarly defined by their inherent decency. This is also a man who has been married for 37 years – to the same woman. Not that Pullman necessarily sees himself as having a brand. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, you do’,” he admits. “But I think I’m available for (the whole of) human behavior. And it’s nice to live on the other side every once in a while.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
To be sure, Pullman – whose impressive film career has included roles in everything from “Ruthless People” (1986), “Spaceballs” (1987) and “The Accidental Tourist” (1988) to “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), “Casper” (1995) and David Lynch’s mega-bizarre “Lost Highway” (1997) – may be one of the few people in America who had never heard a thing about the Murdaugh case when he was presented the “Murdaugh Murders” script and offered the role of the South Carolina lawyer who was convicted of double homicide in March 2023. “I didn’t have any clue about it,” he says. “I feel like I’m reading all the friggin’ time and don’t go for a lot of clickbait.”
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Fortunately, there was (and still is) a truckload of video about the case and of the trial itself, since South Carolina is one of the states that allows cameras in the courtroom. “And so you get to see all the characters in the life of a person like Murdaugh,” Pullman emphasizes. “There’s this wealth of information there, but at the same time it’s a lot of heavy data, and at a certain point it has to organize itself if you’re going to portray somebody like that. Eventually, I kind of organized it.” But once he said yes, Pullman had only six days to prep before shooting began, as producers were trying to get it in the can before actors and writers went out on strike.
The one caveat Pullman had when accepting the role was that he wouldn’t simply perform as a mimic, copying the quirks and precise movements of the man he’s portraying. “People were talking about certain moments in the Netflix documentary series (on the Murdaugh case), like about how he said this, how he turned this way,” he recalls. “I could see myself in some kind of bad nightmare of having producers (order that). I had to get some elbow room and say, ‘Look, I’m not going to do that. If you want that fine, go get somebody (else). But our director Greg Beeman and (executive producer) Stacy Mandelberg were very supportive.”
Pullman was also excited to portray an addict, as Murdaugh was, particularly a pill-popper because he typically doesn’t drink enough water on the set and “it really allowed me to get my daily portion of liquids.”
This doesn’t mean the portrayal wasn’t also a significant acting challenge for Pullman. He was tasked with hooking into the deceptive speech pattern of a known sociopath during the trial sequences, with dialogue hewing closely to the actual trial transcripts. “(Murdaugh) would be talking about different things, and then you realize, in the middle of a sentence, he’d change. That’s kind of like how it is now with politicians.. They don’t finish their sentences. They fix them in the middle.”
Pullman finds it fascinating how the appeal of the Murdaugh murder tale captured the obsessive interest of pretty much everyone, cutting across all demographic groups. “It was compelling all across the strata, from working-class people all the way up to brainiacs,” he observes. He points out how in its end-of-the-year overview at newyorker.com, the website revealed that its most-dead article of 2023 was one about Murdaugh. His theory is that people – all people – are enthralled by the secrets that especially the rich and famous among us harbor. “This kind of story pulls back that curtain a little bit,” he maintains, “and it’s quite unnerving to have people close to you carry a whole chapter that’s unknown.”
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