NEED TO KNOW
Brittany Snow got to put journalist Mandy Matney in the hot seat.
While preparing to portray Matney in the Hulu true-crime series Murdaugh: Death in the Family, the actress, 39, says she asked her real-life counterpart “so many” questions.
“At first, I was talking to her a lot about the character and about how I wanted to encapsulate her and her essence,” Snow tells PEOPLE. “Then, after a while, I just wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty and ask her actual case questions. I was hoping that over time she would slip and give me some insider information, and she did sometimes. It was really fun to get to know her.”
Murdaugh: Death in the Family is based on the rise and fall of the Murdaugh family, a once-powerful legal dynasty in South Carolina.
Daniel Delgado Jr./Disney
Over the course of eight episodes, the show traces how mounting pressures, deceit and betrayal led to patriarch Alex Murdaugh murdering his wife, Maggie, and their son, Paul, in 2021. Matney became known for her true-crime podcast delving into the case.
When she first heard about the role, Snow says “there was no doubt in my mind that this is something that I wanted to do.”
“I’m such a fan of true crime, but more than that, I’m such a fan of Mandy and her reporting,” she says. “I was very well aware of her podcast, and I felt like this was an important part to play within a very dark story. This person was spearheading justice and the truth when a lot of corruption was going on. As an actress, you don’t always get to play those types of people that are standing up for what’s right.”
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Snow says something she told Matney “from the very beginning” was that she “was never going to do an imitation” of her.
“That would be doing a disservice to her, to me and to my performance,” she says. “What I wanted to make sure I was doing was encapsulating sort of an essence of her. I felt like there were certain mannerisms I wanted to pay homage to in the best way that I could. I think she was proud of the performance.”
New episodes of Murdaugh: Death in the Family drop Wednesdays on Hulu.
