Too big to ignore, too complex to capture? The many faces of Rupert Murdoch

3 weeks ago 9

With the Delaware courtroom denouement of the Murdoch family succession struggles seemingly behind them, you might have thought the family’s patriarch was content in semi-retirement with fifth wife Elena Zhukov, content to cast his long shadow over the post-Disney merger Murdoch media empire.

But true to form, and cinematically fitter than many men a quarter of his age, 94-year old Rupert Murdoch will step onto the screen in two major new projects. The Hack, the dramatisation of the phone-hacking scandal which caused The News of the World to implode, will star Steve Pemberton. Ink, director Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of James Graham’s play, will star Guy Pearce.

as portrayed in The Simpsons, and by Patrick Brammall in the miniseries Power Games.

But here’s the thing: Murdoch, the man who owns the networks that air the biopics which cast actors in the roles of famous people, is not a man accustomed to being played himself. Pemberton and Pearce’s performances will join a growing body of artistic work, where directors and casting executives have tried to do just that, not always successfully.

They range from Selling Hitler, the 1991 television comedy/drama about the Hitler Diaries hoax in the British media, to the much more substantial 2002 film Black and White, written by Louis Nowra, about a young Indigenous man, Max Stuart, who was sentenced to death after a murder trial. In both stories, Murdoch was a peripheral player.

Other projects have tried to dramatise Murdoch’s life story in different ways and in greater detail. But the curious thing about Murdoch is the manner in which dramatisations of the man often fall short of the real man himself. Too often they lean into stereotype, they over-Australianise his accent, often for an American audience. They grasp for the headline, and in doing so, often miss the story.

In The Simpsons, in 2001, Murdoch featured in an exchange with Bart Simpson, after Bart pledged money during a telethon to save Murdoch’s US network, Fox. “Hello! Murdoch, here. You saved my network!” he said. Bart’s reply: “Wouldn’t be the first time.” (It was a nod to the fact that the success of The Simpsons had, in historical terms, bailed Fox out in the network’s earliest, unprofitable years.)

Though Murdoch did lend his real voice to The Simpsons in two other episodes, in that episode, and a handful of others, he was voiced by Dan Castellaneta, the man behind the voices of Homer Simpson, Krusty the Clown, Springfield’s mayor Joe Quimby and school janitor Groundskeeper Willie and others.

So in the search for the perfect cinematic Rupert, why have so many struggled to get it right?

Power Games: The Packer-Murdoch War (2013)
Written by David Caesar and Sam Winston, this Nine Network miniseries more or less did for the men of the media old world what Paper Giants had done for its groundbreaking women. And by and large this succeeded, particularly in the casting of Sir Frank Packer (Lachy Hulme) and Rupert Murdoch (Patrick Brammall).

The triumph of Brammall’s performance here is that it reaches neither for cliche nor caricature, and it lives safely in the relatively younger life of Murdoch, where his voice, mannerisms and movements were less well understood. It’s the same reason Claire Foy’s younger Queen Elizabeth is an easier sell in The Crown than, say, Imelda Staunton’s older, more familiar figure in the later seasons.

Sean O’Shea as Rupert Murdoch in David Wiliamson’s 2013 play.

Rupert, the play (2013)
In the hands of playwright David Williamson, Murdoch was transformed into a somewhat more theatrical and more Shakespearean figure, with Williamson himself comparing Murdoch to Shakespeare’s Richard III in an interview with Crikey.

“Rupert, of course, hasn’t murdered his brother and seduced the wife of the man he’s just murdered within the first 10 minutes of the play, but then Richard comes to a grisly end, whereas Rupert survives everything and his share prices and fortune keep rising,” Williamson said. “So in that sense his story is even more remarkable.”

Art imitating life? Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) in Succession.

Succession (2018-2023)
The prodigious HBO media soap opera offered audiences a glimpse into the life of Rupert Murdoch, though it dressed the Murdochs up as the fictional Roy family, and turned cast Brian Cox as gregarious family patriarch Logan Roy.

Of course, this was a work of fiction, but in many, many ways, the art of Succession mirrored the lives of the Murdochs.

Storylines including Logan Roy’s health scare, which became a family reckoning moment, the sale of the family company Waystar Royco to another company, and the family trust which became a sticking point for the Roy family over control of the media empire could be traced back to the real lives of the Murdochs.

Things got even weirder when the show began to appear in the family’s internal correspondences. The New York Times reported that the show had triggered a real-life family discussion about what would happen when Rupert died, and Rupert’s 2022 divorce settlement with Jerry Hall included a clause that forbade her from supplying story ideas to the Succession writers.

Simon McBurney as Rupert Murdoch in The Loudest Voice.

The Loudest Voice and Bombshell (2019)
In one year, film and television audiences were given not one, but two Ruperts Murdoch. The first, played by English theatre actor Simon McBurney, featured in the television miniseries The Loudest Voice, which explored the rise of Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe) and how he transformed Fox News from a fringe player to the most influential US cable news channel of the 21st century.

The second, played by the more recognisable film actor Malcolm McDowell, appeared in the film Bombshell, which dramatised the events in which several women at Fox News, including Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), exposed CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. The gift with purchase here: Australian acting siblings Ben and Josh Lawson as Lachlan and James Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch in an animated moment with Homer Simpson.

The Apprentice (2024)
By a long measure one of the most compelling stories to feature Murdoch, this isn’t really a Murdoch story, except that the story of Murdoch has, in the past two decades, become inextricably intertwined with the story of the film’s subject, Donald Trump, played here by Sebastian Stan.

The film’s primary focus is Trump’s emergence in New York as a powerful real estate mogul and his friendship with the man many understand to be one of his most influential mentors, Roy Cohn, played with typical distracting brilliance by Succession star Jeremy Strong. Tom Barnett’s performance isn’t blink-and-you’ll-miss it, but he’s too low on the call sheet to wrest the spotlight.

Ink, the play (2017, 2019) and now the movie, release date TBC
Written by James Graham, this play is set in 1969 and chronicles Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun. Produced for the stage in 2017 and 2019, with British stage actor Bertie Carvel in the role for both iterations, this is the project which is now being adapted into a film, starring Guy Pearce. While the film adaptation remains sight unseen, the stage production won a Laurence Olivier Award for Carvel after its 2017 London season, and a Tony Award for Carvel after its 2019 Broadway run.

But before then, we will get upcoming TV drama The Hack, written by Jack Thorne and Annalisa D’Innella, and directed by Lewis Arnold, which follows the work of journalist Nick Davies (David Tennant) between 2002 and 2012, into phone-hacking at one of Murdoch’s flagship newspapers, The News of the World. In it, Murdoch will be played by Steve Pemberton, best known from the comedy The League of Gentlemen.

As for Murdoch himself, it’s hard to say how he feels, though Ink star Bertie Carvel came close to getting an answer.

During his run on stage playing Murdoch, Carvel came face to face with the man himself, and pair shared a brief exchange.

“This is weird,” Carvel said to him. And Murdoch, deadpan, replied: “Yes, it is.”

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