Taking a page from the playbook of former president Barack Obama, former fictional president Bill Pullman is revealing some of his musical taste. But while Obama’s bi-yearly lists of favorite works of art from the year typically indicate how much our cool, cigarette-smoking, Kendrick Lamar-listening 44th president wants to be an arbiter of taste, Pullman’s tracks show how much he likes late-90s Travolta thrillers. Speaking to Variety, Pullman reveals that Carter Burwell’s score for The General’s Daughter helps him summon the emotions to play Alex Murdaugh, the infamous millionaire who murdered his wife and child.
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Pullman used music as a distraction after a long day shooting the Murdaugh Murders: The Movie for Lifetime. He remembers one song he “had used a lot,” “Defying Gravity” by folk singer Jesse Winchester—not to be confused with any song from Wicked or Glee. “It’s a very sweet lullaby song,” Pullman said. He also listened to the score from The General’s Daughter, a 1999 mystery thriller about the murder of a general’s daughter on a Georgia military base. Pullman says the score came after “Moby had started sampling old folk Library of Congress recordings and making them into set tracks and adding layers.” We have no idea what he means by this, considering that Burwell wrote the score, and Moby is nowhere to be found in the credits. There are a few re-mixed spirituals at the top of the album that sound like Moby and may be what Pullman is referring to. However, those, too, were orchestrated by Burwell. While this might be the most anyone’s discussed Simon West’s turn-of-the-century blockbuster, Pullman would throw it on “when I realized I’d be too much in the world.”
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Pullman, who seems genuinely uncomfortable explaining his process, says he doesn’t have a “comfort show” to help him unwind from playing Murdaugh. In the past, he’s claimed to watch Bridgerton, which he admits is just one of those lies he blurted out for some reason. What he meant to say is that he finds comfort in watching other actors, such as Bessie Carter, who is on Bridgerton, and Pullman wants to watch that show sometime. “But I’ve never watched Bridgerton. I thought, ‘Why did I do this?’” Between Bridgerton and this story about Moby, we’re wondering the same thing.