1 of 4 | Jason Clarke and Patricia Arquette star in “Murdaugh: Death in the Family.” Photo courtesy of Hulu

NEW YORK, Oct. 15 (UPI) — Oscar-winning True Romance, Boyhood and Severance actress Patricia Arquette says her new true-crime drama, Murdaugh: Death in the Family, attempts to unwind the complicated, dysfunctional marriage at the heart of the notorious double-murder case.

“I was really interested in this co-dependent kind of dynamic with somebody who’s deceptive and gas-lighting and betraying and loving you and [is] your partner,” Arquette, 57, told UPI in a Zoom interview Monday.

“They’re diabolical and they’re a pathological liar and you have kids with them and they’re your home and you’ve been through all this history and starting to see all of these things starting to be revealed,” she said. “It’s just a disaster that ripples out across the whole community.”

Premiering Wednesday on Hulu and Disney+, the limited series is based on Mandy Matney’s Murdaugh Murders podcast.

It dramatizes the stranger-than-fiction case of wealthy, corrupt South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh (Jason Clarke), who was convicted in 2023 of murdering his wife Maggie (Arquette) and 22-year-old son Paul (Johnny Berchtold).

At the time of his death, Paul had been under indictment in a fatal boating accident and his father and grandfather Randolph (Gerald McRaney) were threatening witnesses not to testify against him.

“Whenever you see something in the headlines, you know there’s more and more going on,” Clarke, 56, said about the many twists and turns in the story.

“You know, somewhere below, is actually a very universal story that goes to in extremis that not anybody does,” he added.

“I wanted to understand, how does this man, who has everything, end up where he does and make those decisions? I’m a father. I’ve got a wife and I just found it incredibly sad and Shakespearean. I thought it would be a lot of fun to play.”

While there was no shortage of video footage of Alex for Clarke to study, there wasn’t a lot of documentation of Maggie for Arquette to absorb.

“I didn’t have that much because Maggie was a support system. She was the mom. She was dropping off the food to the PTA. She was doing that stuff, taking pictures of her boys, propping them up, propping [Alex] up,” Arquette said.

“That was her part. That’s the part she was raised to play and, so, there wasn’t that much about her, but Mandy was very helpful and told me what kind of makeup she wore, what she made for breakfast, and all kinds of things like that.”

The Last Frontier and Brotherhood actor Clarke, on the other hand, was able to draw from Alex’s social media videos, press interviews and court appearances in crafting his portrayal of the disgraced legal scion.

“As an actor, you watch the scripts get to that point and make those moments make sense and you go, ‘Yes, we’re on the right thing,'” Clarke said. “You sit there and you watch on a slightly different angle, so you see a slightly different version of Alex.”

The actor went on to say Alex is a man of many moods and faces who “blindsided” and “traumatized” his neighbors with the “complete horror” of killing his wife and son.

“The judge, at the end, says how he feels about Alex: ‘I’ve known you for 20 years and I saw you two weeks after the murders, and I waved at the hotel. I thought, “Oh, that poor man,” and now I know who you are,'” Clarke said. “Everybody had the wool pulled over their eyes.”