Jason Clarke on Playing Alex Murdaugh: 'I'm Not Going to Play a Bad Guy'

To play Alex Murdaugh, Jason Clarke wasn’t going to turn the man into a caricature, telling producers, “I’m not going to play a bad guy here,” Clarke told Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott. Instead, Clarke focused on the “tragedy of Roman proportions” in Hulu’s ‘Murdaugh: Death in the Family,’ based on the true story of a South Carolina man convicted in 2023 of murdering his wife and son. “We’re not here to sensationalize it or even to replay it. We’re there to open it up.” Clarke has two other big projects this year. The first is the Apple TV+ series ‘The Last Frontier,’ where he plays a U.S. Marshal in Alaska hunting fugitives who escaped a plane crash. “It’s a gut thing. Do I feel like doing eight months in the snow and the winter and the action? You know what? Yes.” Then there’s ‘A House of Dynamite,’ about which he says director Kathryn Bigelow has “stripped back a lot of the usual tools of cinema.” This diversity in roles is exactly why Clarke does what he does. “The times I’m grumpy, I’m frustrated, I’m hurting, I realized just how lucky I am and also what I’m capable of, and that if you find the right things, you can really disappear into them.”  Subscribe to my newsletter: https://link.newsweek.com/join/for-the-culture  Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott  Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.