‘Coastal Elites’ – Sarah Paulson gets emotional in new HBO special
In the age of the pandemic, “Coastal Elites” have a lot to grapple with in a special upcoming on HBO.
Premiering Saturday, Sept. 12, the comic satire from director Jay Roach (“Bombshell,” “Game Change”) and screenwriter Paul Rudnick (“Addams Family Values,” “Sister Act”) tells the stories of individuals from New York to Los Angeles coping with politics and the pandemic in the summer of 2020.
Among them are Miriam (Bette Midler, “Beaches”), a cultured New York City schoolteacher who finds herself in police custody; Clarissa (Sarah Paulson, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”), a YouTube personality who produces a series called “Mindful Meditations”; Mark (Dan Levy, “Schitt’s Creek”), a gay West Hollywood actor videoconferencing with his therapist during a moment of personal and professional stress; and Callie (Issa Rae, “Insecure”), a West African woman whose activism takes her all around the globe.
Rudnick conceived this as a stage production to be performed at The Public Theatre in New York, then rewrote it as a TV program when the lockdown hit. Each actor’s monologue was filmed at their home and then edited together with other soliloquies. The turn-around time was fast as shooting ended in mid-July with editing and postproduction taking the last two months.
“I started writing this over a year ago, pre-pandemic, pre-protests, everything,” Rudnick explains. “But the spark for it was that I had realized that for the past four years now, everyone I knew on every side of the political divide was spending 24 hours a day angry and heartbroken and totally addicted to discussing this country and its future and every aspect of politics and their personal lives. And I’d never seen that level of emotion and engagement ...
“And it became so urgent that it was something that I became desperate to write about. So when these characters kind of came to me, it was the best way to write and it’s very rare that there were these people who just wanted to be heard. So I let them.”
Paulson initially turned down her part down because it conflicted with shooting FX’s upcoming “American Crime Story: Impeachment,” in which she is slated to play Linda Tripp. When the pandemic shuttered production there, she was free to do this project, which she shot in a tent in her backyard with the help of a camera crew and green screen.
It tells the story of a woman who has a moment of vulnerability at the worst possible time.
“She’s sort of explaining something that’s happened to her recently (that) had an enormous impact on her,” the actress explains. “And because she’s sort of live on the air, she’s having a kind of – not a Paddy Chayefsky sort of ‘Network’ breakdown, but almost something to that extent where she is finding herself exposed and having a big sort of emotional internal upheaval that many people watching can unfortunately or fortunately be part of.”