At the time, the 22-year-old aspiring actor and filmmaker was living in Los Angeles, working various jobs—mostly bussing tables and nannying—as she struggled to find auditions in the aftermath of the pandemic. She’d recently started a production company and directed a short film, but “it felt like my career was going nowhere,” Maddox tells TIME.
Arguelles had been raised by his mother and stepfather, and had never known his biological father. He’d been registered on Ancestry.com since 2015 with hopes of discovering the other piece of his parentage, but over the previous seven years he’d only matched with third cousins. “We kind of gave up on the idea that we'd find his dad,” Maddox says. Until he learned of a new match—to a user named Michael Brunner, who happened to share the same father: the notorious killer Charles Manson.
Though this information would eventually inspire Maddox to make her first film, the new Hulu documentary My Grandfather Charles Manson, the news initially broke her. “It was very much like [the paternity scene] in One Battle After Another,” Maddox says, referring to Chase Infiniti’s character in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Picture-winning film. “At the very end, he just put his arm around me as I sobbed while he was driving.” Later that night, she prayed that something had gone wrong with the DNA test, or that the website had made an error. But Brunner and Arguelles retook separate tests to confirm the source. Not long after, Arguelles subpoenaed Kern County, attained Manson’s DNA from his estate, and took another test that came back with a 99.9999 percent positive match. “My mental reality completely shifted,” Maddox says. “My existence changed because of this revelation.”
“When Sophia told me the story, you just cannot believe it,” Orton says. “Everybody has to come to terms with skeletons in their family in some capacity, but it's never this extreme.”
Archival photos of Sophia and her father Daniel —Courtesy of Hulu
But eventually, she felt like she had a story to tell. Eric Cook, her producing partner, gave her a camcorder to start filming more seriously. Over the next eight months, she recorded interviews—including one with her dad—created more self-tapes, pulled archival material, and compiled research to build a teaser video. “Once we made that sizzle reel together, we realized how helpful those video diaries were and how unfiltered and unproduced they really were,” Maddox says.
The pair’s investigation starts at the Indiana boys reform school where Manson spent two years. Through records, Maddox learned her grandfather amassed 28 bad conduct reports, often the victim of (and sometimes the perpetrator of) physical punishment and sexual assault. In her quest for more insight into his personality, Maddox also contacted and interviewed former members of his cult family—including Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Dianne Lake, and Stephanie Schram—along with some figures from Manson’s more recent past, including a man who calls himself Blackwolf, who recorded around 800 calls with Manson before he died.
“I think what makes this film different from any other Manson documentary, besides my personal connection, is that a lot of people don’t bother to look at people on the fringes of society who have a different background and lifestyle,” Maddox says. “I'm not taking their stories as fact. It's just a collection of data. That was always my intention.”
Perhaps the biggest insight came from Maddox’s attempts to speak with law enforcement and contemporary historians of Manson. The filmmakers found that even mentioning her bloodline repelled potential subjects from agreeing to be interviewed. “They would hear ‘granddaughter’ and immediately make a judgment about her that had nothing to do with who she is,’” Orton says. “She's an amazing, trustworthy, kind human being who has nothing to do with her grandfather.”
The impact on a father-daughter bond
An archival image of Manson in My Grandfather Charles Manson —Courtesy of HuluAs Maddox explains in the documentary, Darlene, who died in 2020, had a brief romantic encounter with “Charlie Dear,” whom she met at a bus stop when she was 17 years old. Ten years after Arguelles was born in 1959, Darlene realized Manson was likely the father when his name began popping up in headlines. The resemblance is striking. “Manson’s picture popped up, and that's when I went, ‘OK, yeah, that's your dad,’” Maddox remembers.
“What I gleaned from this process was that there are definite mental health issues that run in our family,” Maddox says. “I had a good childhood where my dad loved me very much and told me I was a good person. He said all the things he never heard as a kid. He wanted to give me the childhood he never got, and he did the best he could without a handbook or an example. I always told myself that my dad's capability for love was innate. I don't know where he got it from.”
“I still don't know how Sophia did it all,” Orton says. “I joke to her a lot that whatever movie she makes next is going to feel so easy.”
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