The cast list for Murdaugh: Death in the Family features no shortage of all-stars successfully portraying the real-life people involved in the true-crime drama, and TV and film veteran Gerald McRaney is one of them. The Simon & Simon, Major Dad, and This Is Us alum had a particularly tall order when it came to playing Randolph Murdaugh III, the father of Alex Murdaugh (played by Jason Clarke) in the series, given his stature in the story and the relative lack of video footage widely available of him.
Randolph was a titanic figure in the Murdaugh family, for better and for worse. As the Hulu series shows, he was right in the thick of it when it came to some of the family’s biggest scandals, like the boat wreck that killed Mallory Beach and began the chain of events that would result in the grisly double homicide of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. Unlike others in the case, Randolph’s visage and demeanor weren’t as widely documented, as legendary as he was, so McRaney had room to run when it came to his depiction of events.
In the series, McRaney plays Randolph as a no-nonsense, iron-fisted family patriarch who doesn’t hide his true feelings about his sons — particularly Alex — or his grandson Paul. His first obligation is to his family legacy, and McRaney plays him as sharp as a tack in each scene.
TV Insider caught up with Gerald McRaney to talk about his performance in the show, so read on to hear what he had to say about its first three episodes, now streaming on Hulu.
How much did you know about the Murdaugh murders saga before you joined the series?
Gerald McRaney: Well, probably not much more than a lot of people did, but I did have sort of a special interest in it. My oldest daughter lives in Beaufort, South Carolina, which is where the boating accident actually happened. And my granddaughter got married in the town where the murders actually happened. So a distant, personal relationship to it.
With Randolph, there wasn’t as much publicly available video and records as with some of the other people involved in this. So how did you approach creating his cadence and demeanor in this series?
Well, I just assumed that I’d go back to the basics in acting, which is, “What if I were in this particular set of circumstances?” And I’d have to create it from there with what was known about Randolph, and just go from there… Plus, I think this whole mess was from generations of indulgent fathers who kept covering up for the prodigal son, and sooner or later, something like this was bound to happen.
You also played him as though the character seemed to know that it was bound to happen.
Yeah. Well, that was my take on it, is that, “This boy ain’t right, and something’s gonna happen.”
I really love the early scene we see with Randolph playing solitaire at the same time that he’s kind of pitting his sons against each other… Your character was such a sigil for the father’s tendency to make his sons argue.
Well, I don’t know that he was actually making them argue with each other, or just sitting back and observing the behavior, but I think his attitude in that was one that could cause the sons to argue. I don’t know if he consciously set out to do that, but at that point in these kinds of relationships with people, those sorts of things happen, not unconsciously, but subconsciously, where you know the manipulator doesn’t know he’s manipulating.
Disney / Daniel Delgado Jr.
In the hospital scene in Episode 2, we first really get to see Randolph’s power and his posturing, doing what he does. How did you approach that scene to make it so we feel the panic that he’s experiencing?
Well, I think Randolph’s panic was two-fold. I really do think that he cared about his family and what happened to them, but also, I think he had perfect knowledge at the moment that it occurred that this is going to unravel everything, and the family is going to be exposed for something that the populace did not expect from them. I think a lot of people just regarded them as this rather dignified southern law family, and what they were was sort of Machiavellian, but this was going to open the whole thing up.
In the first episode, the speech that he gives about the man in the mirror. It’s reflective of the whole series. Did you know how important that scene was when you were doing it?
Well, I always tend to regard every scene as important, but yes, I did, and I knew that that speech was intended to be thematic more than anything else. But then you have to, as an actor, make that speech have its immediate value. You can’t lay on the thematic quality of it so much.
There’s also a moment that’s kind of tender, when Randolph is talking to Maggie, and he’s actually saying things that her husband doesn’t know about his gratitude. That’s really important to show how close they were, so that later events would make sense. Can you just talk about approaching that moment?
I think he really did love Maggie. And I think there was part of Randolph that knew that his son had married up a great deal.
Stay tuned for more of our conversation with Gerald McRaney about all-things-Murdaugh as the series progresses…
Murdaugh: Death in the Family, Wednesdays, Hulu