“Murdaugh: Death in the Family” star Jason Clarke has finally offloaded his Los Angeles abode after it spent more than a year on the market—albeit for a substantially discounted sum.
Clarke, 56, whose new Hulu series about convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh premiered on Wednesday, initially listed his midcentury modern dwelling for $3.95 million in April 2024 but faced a tough battle to secure a buyer, which resulted in the price being reduced on several occasions.
In May 2025, it was discounted to $3.19 million, with records indicating that Clarke and his wife, Cécile Breccia, accepted an offer of just $3 million in a deal that closed officially at the end of August.
The sale of the five-bedroom, four-bathroom property, which is located near Mulholland Drive, comes amid a very busy time for Clarke, who has starred in three major on-screen projects this year, while also embarking on a construction project in his native Australia, where he is in the process of building a new home.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Clarke opened up about his enduring ties to his home country, looking back on his earliest year being raised in a tiny caravan in Winton, near Queensland, and his rather unconventional road to Hollywood fame.
Today, Clarke is best known for appearing in a swath of blockbuster hits—including the Oscar-winning “Oppenheimer” and the 2012 thriller “Zero Dark Thirty”—but he has now admitted that pursuing a career on camera never really seemed to be in the cards when he was younger.
Instead, the A-lister initially began studying law at university, a path that he has now returned to, in a very different way, by portraying disgraced lawyer and convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh in a new Hulu series about the brutal slayings of Murdaugh’s wife and son at their South Carolina estate.
Though the twisted tale is a world away from what Clarke describes as a very wholesome and loving childhood that he enjoyed in Australia, some small elements of Murdaugh’s life do, in fact, mirror his own.
In addition to his brief dalliance with a legal career, Clarke was raised on a farm—not unlike the enormous property that Murdaugh owned before he was sentenced to two life sentences, having been charged with the murders of his wife, Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22.
That, however, is where the similarities between the two men seem to end.
Unlike Murdaugh, who was born into a very wealthy—and socially prominent—South Carolina family, Clarke’s upbringing was much more humble, beginning in an 11-foot caravan, where his father and mother first lived after he was born.
At the time, Clarke’s dad was working as a sheep farmer and would drive the family “from sheep shed to sheep shed” while his wife cared for their infant son in the cramped family abode.
“During our drives from sheep shed to sheep shed, my mother lost the ability to sleep soundly because I’d scream and carry on so much. Eventually, they bought a 19-footer. The extra space was a dream,” Clarke recalled.
From there, the family moved into their “first proper house … a small, prebuilt model that was placed on the back of a truck” when Clarke was 8. He said that he initially thought the home would remain on the vehicle as the family drove around, just as they had done with their caravan.
Instead, the family put down roots in Padthaway in South Australia, where Clarke would spend the rest of his childhood alongside his three younger siblings: Jodie, Aaron, and Angie.
His introduction to film and TV began very slowly—in fact, the family’s TV had only two channels and Clarke would not watch his first real movie until he was 10 and saw “Sweet Bird of Youth,” which he said “planted the acting seed” for him.
However, his interest in acting hit a roadblock at school, where he says he was unlucky enough to fall out of favor with the drama teachers.
“I was an OK student in high school and didn’t appear in school plays. The drama teachers were a couple hanging on to memories. You were either in favor with them or out, and I was out,” he shared.
It wasn’t until Clarke had enrolled at the University of Adelaide, where he was studying law, that he got his first true introduction to the world of professional acting—when a friend took him on a “two-day train trip” to Sydney to meet with a casting agent.
“She said we could go on auditions for TV shows or, if we were serious, go to drama school,” Clarke said. “That’s when we learned there were places like the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney and the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.”
He managed to secure a spot at the latter—and got his “very lucky” break soon after he graduated at age 25, when he met Richard Roxborough, a fellow actor who had gone on to start a theater company and helped to introduce Clarke to others in the industry.
In 2009, he got his first major brush with Hollywood fame when he landed the role of John “Red” Hamilton in “Public Enemies,” which he said “gave him visibility” in the wider entertainment industry and helped him to launch his career in Los Angeles, where he now lives.
“Today, my wife, French actress Cécile Breccia, our two boys and I divide our time between Los Angeles and Paris. We moved into our L.A. home in 2014, just before our first child was born,” he explained, referring to the property that they have recently sold.
“Our midcentury modern house in L.A. is up in the canyons and very quiet. In Paris, we have a house near the woods on the edge of the city.”
However, Clarke noted that he does still have ties to his native Australia, where he is currently “having a house built on the coast in New South Wales.”
In Los Angeles, his career has gone from strength to strength, culminating in a blockbuster 2025 that will see him star in a total of three different projects: “Murdaugh: Death in the Family,” “The Last Frontier,” and “A House of Dynamite.”
But it was the role of Murdaugh that perhaps intrigued Clarke the most, with the actor explaining to Newsweek that it felt like “one of those roles I just couldn’t say no to,” despite the emotional and physical commitments required to portray the disgraced attorney.
“There’s weight, there’s hair, I’ve got [to] shoot those scenes, man. I’ve gotta … everyone’s heard that 911 call, all those things,” he said.
“And I guess you just, you think, before you even speak to anyone, ‘Can I truly, am I capable of doing this? And am I willing to undertake it? Because this is going to hurt me and it’s probably going to hurt my family. And am I excited by it?’ And I was. I really was.”
To fully step into the role, Clarke had to gain a staggering 40 pounds—in addition to the prosthetics that were applied to transform him fully into Murdaugh. Yet, he says he would happily do it all again.
“It was a lot to play him, and I was a lot to handle on set. [I] was just always willing to go too far, but then always making sure that I cared about everyone around me,” he said. “Things were important to him, still—his community, his town, his reputation, his family, all those things.”
While Clarke admitted that he fully immersed himself in Murdaugh’s life and trial, when it came to filming, the cast, which includes Patricia Arquette as Maggie, did not venture to the family’s real-life estate. Instead, they carried out most of the project in and around Atlanta.
As filming was kicking off, the real-life Murdaugh estate was undergoing a major transformation at the hands of its new owner, Alex Blair, who carried out a significant overhaul of the property after buying it for $1 million at a February 2024 auction.
The newly enlarged Islandton, SC, estate, which is known as Moselle, was put on the market by Blair for $2.75 million in December. That listing was later removed—only to reappear in September of this year for the discounted price of $2.2 million.
