Ocean’s 8 star Sarah tells all
In Ocean’s 8, Sarah Paulson plays a suburban mum who is also an expert at moving stolen goods. But off-screen, the statuesque American Horror Story star is more famous for stealing the heart of another much older actress.
Sarah (43) and Two and a Half Men veteran Holland Taylor (75) are one of the most talked-about power couples in show business and Sarah has recently spoken candidly about their relationship.
Sarah confesses, “People look at me and Holland, and say, ‘Mummy issues?’ But
I parent her as much as she parents me, so that’s not it.
I’ve always had older friends. A lot of people have a stunted way of looking at older people – it’s a way of distancing themselves from something that they think won’t happen to them. I have the good fortune of being with someone who is older and wiser than I am.”
The couple first met at a dinner party 12 years ago. Sarah remembers Holland as “the most exquisitely beautiful woman I’d ever seen”, but they didn’t become a couple for another eight years and Sarah now calls her “the most spectacular person on the planet”.
Sarah came out by accident in 2005, when her then-girlfriend, actress Cherry Jones, won an award and Sarah passionately kissed her. “What was I going to do? Slap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Good job!’?”
It didn’t affect her career and she’s never looked back, though the star admits she feels torn about not having children. “I love kids, but I’m very impulsive. I was afraid that I would have children and then regret it.
But that’s not something I feel entirely confident about either because I might regret not having them too, so I froze my eggs just in case.”
It’s this sort of candour that makes Sarah so appealing to audiences, but it took them a while to get to know her. Fame has come relatively late in the piece for the now leading lady, where it seems like she appeared out of nowhere after her first stint on the anthology series American Horror Story in 2011, and she continues to wow audiences with her weird, unique and tortured characters.
But like many others who are now finding public acclaim in their forties, Sarah was a jobbing actress since her late teens, churning through auditions for pilots, TV movies and small supporting roles “with 65 wigs in my car and six costume changes”.
It was a role in The Glass Menagerie in 2005 on Broadway alongside Jessica Lange which saw her career skyrocket with American Horror Story director Ryan Murphy, who saw her in a play and has found roles for Sarah in nearly everything he’s produced since.
And now, after winning a Golden Globe, an Emmy and a Screen Actors Guild Award, she’s starring alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood including her Ocean’s 8 co-star Sandra Bullock, leaving a trail of those who fall in love with her wherever she goes – while still being true to herself.
Question her about the 32-year age difference between herself and Holland, and she’ll tell you, this isn’t her first rodeo. Sarah makes a habit of dating those older than her. Perhaps, she thinks, it stems from a home life where at the age of five, her parents divorced and along with her mum, the family moved to New York from Florida.
“I had a very complicated home life, and my teachers, predominantly my theatre teachers and my English teachers, were very dedicated to taking care of me in a particular way,” she reveals.
That’s when Sarah realised she had an easy rapport with people many years her senior.
“There’s a poignancy to being with someone older,” she explains. “I think there’s a greater appreciation of time and what you have together and what’s important, and it can make the little things seem very small.”
And so when it comes to children, career, sexuality and love, Sarah will tell you how she feels. But don’t tell her how she should live her life.
“If my life choices had to be predicated based on what was expected of me from a community on either side, that’s going to make me feel straitjacketed, and
I don’t want to feel that,” she tells. “What I can say absolutely is that I am in love and that person happens to be
Holland Taylor.”