Playing Murderous Alex Murdaugh Was Freeing for Bill Pullman

This story gets stranger, though. Once Pullman agreed to play the part, the actor only had about 10 days to familiarize himself with Murdaugh’s sprawling crime saga, including the 911 call, dashcam footage, and courtroom testimony. Because of the looming SAG-AFTRA strike, the Lifetime production had to wrap Pullman’s scenes ASAP. 

Pullman dyed his hair the correct synthetic butterscotch and pored over the tapes of Murdaugh, delighting in the fact that the script’s dialogue hewed so closely to the actual transcripts. The first time we see him in the Lifetime movie, he is fully committed to Murdaugh, wearing the now infamous white T-shirt and pacing frantically. His voice seesaws in that familiar Lowcountry dialect while delivering the 911 call dialogue.

“I need police and an ambulance immediately,” Pullman says, recreating the now infamous call Murdaugh placed on June 7, 2021. “I’ve been up to it now, it’s bad.”

Pullman makes a meal out of Murdaugh’s Lowcountry-isms (Paul becomes “Paw-Paw,” etc.) and behavioral peculiarities, like the slight limp Murdaugh walked with. “It changed when he lost weight,” Pullman says. “He lost probably 60 pounds or so” in the lead-up to the trial, according to the actor.  When Pullman viewed the trial footage, he noticed that Murdaugh had an entirely different physicality when he took the witness stand. “There’s that one angle that sees him from behind, going toward the chair, and he’s limber—almost like an athlete going up to take a penalty shot.”

While studying body camera footage from the night of Maggie and Paul’s murders, Pullman was fascinated by the way Murdaugh shifted from frantic and traumatized (“I’m all caught up in this thing that’s gripping me,” he says, putting on the urgent affect heard during Murdaugh’s 911 call) to casual, collected, and almost helpful with police (“Oh, no, that was over there,” he says while in calm-Murdaugh mode).

Pullman is from rural New York and spends a lot of time in desolate Montana. “In rural areas, there’s a little bit more humility, and sometimes it’s demonstrative humility that is kind of like a put-on thing. Sometimes it’s genuine, but [you’re] much more likely to see somebody with affectations in those areas,” says Pullman. “I love the South for that.”

There’s one detail that Pullman wishes he’d had time to work into his performance: the way Murdaugh, on the evening of the murders, kept interrupting dramatic questioning by police officers to open a car door and spit chew. “In Montana, we call it snus—fine-cut tobacco you put behind your lip,” Pullman tells me. “[Murdaugh] was very discreet about it, but in one of the dashcam recordings, when he’s sitting in the passenger seat up front, a couple times he opened the door, leaned out, and then came back in…. I realized that he was dipping.”