Joey King Shows Up for Husband Steven Piet at Murdaugh Premiere

Some red carpets are about the movie. Some are about the dress. And every now and then, one is about simply showing up for the person standing next to you — which is exactly what Joey King did on Monday night in New York City.

The 26-year-old actress stepped out with her husband, director Steven Piet, for the premiere of his new Hulu limited series, Murdaugh: Death in the Family. It was Piet’s night, really. He’s an executive producer on the show, and he directed three of its episodes, including the premiere and the finale — the two hours that matter most when you’re trying to hook an audience and then stick the landing. King was there front and center, on his arm, smiling for the cameras like this was the easiest place in the world to be.

Honestly? That’s the kind of low-key, unbothered couple energy that’s become their signature. No over-the-top PDA tour, no coordinated press blitz. Just: my husband made a show, I’m proud of him, and we’re going to look great while we celebrate it.

A Coordinated Couple on the Carpet

Speaking of looking great — the two matched on purpose. King and Piet both wore outfits from Bode, the New York label known for its quilted jackets, vintage fabrics, and pieces that look like they have a story behind them. It’s a fitting choice for a premiere built around a story everybody already thinks they know.

King finished her look with Christian Louboutin shoes, a Le Vian gemstone ring, and earrings plus a gold ring by Carrera y Carrera. And yes, the red hair. King has been rocking a vivid copper-red shade lately, and it turned heads all over again on the carpet. She’d just come from Paris Fashion Week the week before, where the new color made its rounds through front rows and after-parties. Whatever the reason behind the switch — a role, a mood, a Tuesday — it works. The color photographs like a dream against a black carpet, and it gave her whole look a jolt of warmth that stood out in a sea of standard premiere neutrals.

It’s a small thing, hair color, but in King’s case it’s part of a bigger pattern. She has never been the kind of star who locks into one look and stays there. She reinvents, she experiments, and she clearly has fun doing it. That’s been true since she was a kid actor, and it’s still true now that she’s one of the more reliable young leading ladies working in Hollywood.

What Is Murdaugh: Death in the Family?

For anyone who somehow missed the Murdaugh saga — and honestly, it was hard to miss — here’s the short version. The series dramatizes the real-life downfall of Alex Murdaugh, a once-powerful South Carolina attorney whose family name carried serious weight in the state’s Lowcountry legal world. Over the course of a few years, that world collapsed in spectacular fashion: a fatal boating accident involving his son, a tangled web of financial crimes, and eventually the murders of his wife, Maggie, and their younger son, Paul. Murdaugh was convicted of those murders in 2023.

It’s the kind of story that sounds made up until you remember it isn’t, which is exactly why it has already spawned documentaries, podcasts, and endless true-crime coverage. Hulu’s take, though, is the big scripted swing — a limited series with a heavyweight cast and a prestige-drama polish.

Patricia Arquette stars as Maggie Murdaugh, and Jason Clarke plays Alex. That pairing alone tells you the show isn’t going for tabloid treatment. Arquette has a long track record of disappearing into complicated, real-life-adjacent women, and Clarke has made a career out of playing men you can’t quite get a read on. Around them is a strong ensemble built to fill in the world of a family that seemed untouchable until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

The first three episodes land on Hulu on October 15, with the remaining episodes rolling out weekly after that. It’s the classic limited-series release pattern: give viewers enough to binge on night one, then make them wait, argue, and theorize for the rest of the run. Given how much conversation the real case already generated, expect the weekly drops to do exactly that.

And for Piet, the stakes are personal in a way that goes beyond a directing credit. Directing the premiere means setting the tone — the look, the pace, the way the audience first meets this family. Directing the finale means delivering the payoff. Handing one person both ends of a limited series is a real vote of confidence from the network and the producers, and it’s the kind of assignment that can define the next phase of a director’s career.

A Full-Circle Reunion With The Act

Here’s the part that makes this premiere feel a little like fate. The series marks a reunion of sorts with The Act, the 2019 Hulu true-crime drama where King and Piet first met — and where Arquette also starred.

If you need a refresher: The Act told the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mother, Dee Dee, in a performance that earned King an Emmy nomination and announced her, definitively, as a dramatic actor to take seriously. Arquette played Dee Dee and won an Emmy for it. Piet directed episodes of that series too, which is how he and King first crossed paths on set.

They kept their relationship fairly quiet in the beginning, the way a lot of couples who meet at work do. But the timeline is sweet in retrospect: they met making a show about a twisted mother-daughter relationship, fell in love, and got married in 2023 in a Mallorca ceremony that looked like it belonged in a travel magazine. Now, years later, they’re back on a Hulu red carpet together, with Arquette once again at the center of a true-crime story and Piet once again behind the camera.

There is something genuinely nice about that symmetry. Hollywood is full of people who meet on set and flame out just as fast. King and Piet went the other direction — they built something steady, and they keep finding ways to work in the same orbit without making it a whole brand. She shows up for his premieres. He directs the kind of prestige television that gives actors like Arquette room to do career-best work. Everybody wins.

Joey King’s Road Here

It’s easy to forget how long King has been doing this. She started as a child actor, broke through as Ramona Quimby in Ramona and Beezus, and then rode the teen-romcom wave as the star of Netflix’s The Kissing Booth trilogy. A lot of actors would have gotten stuck there, happily churning out sequels. King didn’t.

Instead, she zigzagged: the devastating dramatic turn in The Act, a scene-stealing role in the action ensemble Bullet Train opposite Brad Pitt, the Netflix romcom A Family Affair with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron, and the dystopian YA adaptation Uglies. That’s a weird, wonderful résumé — horror-tinged drama, action, romance, sci-fi — and it shows a performer who would clearly rather take a swing than play it safe.

That range is part of why she remains so watchable on a red carpet, too. She’s not selling one version of herself. One week she’s in Paris for fashion week with copper-red hair; the next she’s in New York supporting her husband’s true-crime premiere in coordinated Bode. The through line isn’t a look or a genre. It’s the sense that she’s actually enjoying the ride.

Why True-Crime Limited Series Keep Landing

There’s a broader reason a show like Murdaugh: Death in the Family arrives with this much buzz attached. True-crime limited series have become one of television’s most reliable formats — not because audiences love the grim details, though some certainly do, but because the best of them use a real case as a doorway into bigger questions. Power. Family. The systems that protect certain people for far too long. What happens when the armor finally cracks.

The Murdaugh story has all of that baked in. A prominent family. A small community. Money, influence, and a justice system that seemed, for a long time, to bend around one last name. A scripted series can’t answer every question the case raised, and the smart ones don’t try. What it can do is put faces and motives and human messiness onto a story most people only know from headlines and courtroom sketches.

That’s the bet Hulu is making here, and Piet’s involvement at both ends of the season suggests the show wants to be taken seriously as drama, not just as a recap. If the premiere sets the right tone — tense, human, a little bit haunted — the weekly rollout should keep people talking well past October.

The Night Itself

Premieres for a show like this carry their own specific energy. There’s the usual glamour, sure — the step-and-repeat, the flashbulbs, the fashion credits that will get picked apart online for days. But there’s also a kind of nervous electricity, because everyone in the room knows the cast and crew are about to hand their work over to the public. You can rehearse and reshoot and recut for months. After the premiere, the show belongs to the audience.

For Piet, Monday night was the start of that handoff. For King, it was a chance to stand next to her husband at the exact moment his biggest project yet steps into the spotlight. And for everyone else in attendance — including Arquette, whose performance is already drawing early attention — it was the first real test of whether the series can live up to the story that inspired it.

We’ll find out soon enough. The first three episodes arrive October 15, and if the premiere-night energy is any indication, plenty of people will be watching. King, for one, will almost certainly be among them — this time from the couch, presumably, with the red hair and the pride very much intact.

Source: Just Jared