Sarah Paulson: ‘If I’m terrified, I feel compelled to do it’
Igot a report yesterday saying it was up by…” Sarah Paulson pauses, weighing up whether she wants to reveal the extent of her daily screen time. Then she takes the plunge. “It was nine hours and 52 minutes,” she says, mock-abashed. In a day? She nods. “In a day, yes. Quite terrible. I think it was… doesn’t it break down how much of it was work? There was work on there. So I was doing some of that. But… it’s embarrassing.”
We are at the start of another long screen day for Paulson, who is speaking from her kitchen, at home in Los Angeles. Her new dog, Winifred, is curled up just out of shot. “Winnie! Would you like to come and say hi?” she coos, in a squeaky voice. “I’m this person! Who does this voice when I talk to my dog!” Winnie is her first dog in nine-and-ahalf years; she has the initials of her old dogs, Alice and Millie, tattooed on the inside of her wrist. “She’s very demanding and she has a lot of personality. She’s recently taken to humping me. She’s my child! Why is she doing this, this 11-month-old, precious little thing? I can’t tell you how upsetting it is. She’s not even 8lb. Her arms clamp around me and I’m like, ‘Oh, stop it!”’
Paulson is a grafting sort of actor, whether she’s playing a conservative protester in Mrs America, a suburban mother who shifts stolen goods in Ocean’s 8, or her nine seasons to date of American Horror Story. But world events have meant that she’s recently been much less busy. “Usually I’m at work and I don’t look at my phone for hours because I can’t,” she says. “But I’m just not as busy. And I don’t seem to have the ability to read right now. My ability to focus is wildly altered in this time.”
Instead of reading, Paulson has been watching a lot of television: “In the olden days, back when I was a child, that would be considered a negative, because there just wasn’t a plethora of very vital, really relevant, enriching things to watch.” Television was mostly trashy then, back in the 80s. But “now I just feel like there’s such magical stuff to watch that is not so much about an escapist experience but more about connecting to other people through story.” She has become a fan of Michaela Coel: “I’mtotally obsessed with I May Destroy You. I just think it’s the most astonishing thing I’ve seen in a long time.”
Paulson came into her prime in her late 30s – she is 45 now – during this new golden age of television. She has long been a familiar face, both on TV and in film. But in 2012, when she took the lead in the second (and best) season of American Horror Story, as an investigative reporter in an asylum, her career soared. It helps that she’s a fun prospect on the promotional side of things, whether that’s wondering if she is or is not friends with Rihanna, her co-star on Ocean’s 8, or reminiscing about sniffing Cher’s head as a guest on talk shows. Now she is chatty and open – we talk far beyond our allotted hour. She speaks quickly and gives long, looping, contemplative answers. She is more introspective than the goofball you’d expect from seeing her on television or red carpets, more nervy and softly spoken, but also pleasingly no-nonsense.
When it comes to acting, though, Paulson transforms into her characters completely. She has played a different character on each season of American Horror Story, from a psychic to the stars to a heroin-addicted ghost, via a headmistress-witch, and both of a pair of conjoined twins. She won multiple awards for playing Marcia Clark in American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson, and her performance saw a readjustment of public opinion on Clark, who had been publicly pilloried for her appearance and ambition throughout the trial and beyond. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that piece had a very positive impact on Marcia,” Paulson says. “And it was a 20year wait for her to have that righted.”
As we speak, the notion of commitment comes up more than once. Paulson was born in Florida, but moved with her mother and sister to New York when she was a child and was raised in the city. She has acted professionally ever since she left school at 18. “I did a play, the requisite Law and Order episode, then I went to Wilmington to do a show called American Gothic. I tend to only do shows with ‘American’ in the title, it’s so weird. American Gothic,American Crime Story,American Horror Story,Mrs America...” She moved to LA when she was 21, but for years she found it hard to admit to herself that the city was home:
“Even when I moved here, I wanted an apartment, I didn’t want a house. I rented apartment after apartment until I finally bought a house, which I guess was really a way of saying, ‘I live here now.’” I expected her to say that this was a long time ago, but it was in 2017. “There was something about it that felt too grown-up to me,” she says, smiling. She mentions an actor friend who invested every bit of money she earned in property. “I was just not interested in that at all. When I look back at it, I must have been really resisting the idea of growing up.”
Paulson’s mother was brought up by religious, conservative parents, and was a debutante. “But that was not my mother’s way of thinking. She moved from where she grew up to New York with two young children and just lived an entirely other life.” Paulson says she sometimes feels like “a travelling salesman”, which suits her line of work. “I like the pick-up-and-go thing. I like not having to pull anything up by the roots.” Buying the house has given her roots. “It’s a recent growing-up. I have to acknowledge that it’s recent. I have come to like it. But I do continue to look at real estate websites.”
We are here to talk about her latest series, Ratched, which reimagines the nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and gives her a rich, fabulous backstory. (After a long discussion about the 1975 film – the patriarchy, institutions and social norms – Paulson says she does not see her character as a villain.) Like American Horror Story, it is from the stable of TV’s production giant Ryan Murphy, and marks another sort of commitment. “Ryan called and asked me, ‘Do you want to do this?’ And I thought, I don’t know that I do,” she says. Netflix commissioned two seasons, and the idea of playing the same character for so long spooked her. “I had to think, was that going to be interesting for me? Not to mention, he asked me to executive produce the thing, and that was something I had never done. It just felt like a big, giant bite to take out of something, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.”
In the end, the fact that it terrified her is what made her say yes. “It is so odd for someone like me, because I am such a nervous kind of person, prone to anxiety, and I think if I feel terrified to do it, I almost feel compelled, that I don’t have a choice.” So much of Paulson’s recent work is dark and horror-tinged, and requires her to put herself through the mill – she runs from clowns, she is blinded by acid. Yet she admits she is “a generally fearful person”. In real life, she avoids getting out of her comfort zone. “I run from bees. I don’t like planes. But with work, it’s like…” She growls, pitches her voice low. “Give it to me!”
She refers to her relationship with Murphy as “the creative marriage of my life”. He tells her his ideas often before he tells his husband, while she says she can “interpret” him with a single word. She isn’t sure why they get each other in the way that they do. “I do think we have some things in common. We were both sort of different[ as kids]. We were, I think, both ‘big feeling’ kind of people.” She has asked him why he thinks they work so well, but she has decided that, ultimately, she’d rather not know. “A lot of women wanted the Marcia Clark part. I don’t know why he thought it should be me. Sometimes I think it’s a good thing to not try to understand every gift you’re given, because it could really come down to just, you know, ‘I couldn’t think of another actor I wanted to be on a set with.’”
Though she hasn’t had to do it in a while, Paulson likes auditioning; it makes her feel like she’s earned the part. “I haven’t auditioned for something since The Goldfinch – the thud heard around the world,” she says, gamely, of the big-budget Donna Tartt adaptation that didn’t so much soar as fly straight into a closed window. She was a big fan of the book, and fought hard to play Xandra. “I wish the thing had been a mini-series. I think you needed to feel that passage of time, and you can’t do that in a two-hour movie, or however long it ended up being.” She shrugs. “I never saw it.”
She isn’t being rude – Paulson never watches herself on screen. When The People vs OJ Simpson finished shooting, she was devastated, because: “I didn’t want that experience of picking the moments where I’m unsatisfied with what I did.” Paulson won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her portrait of Marcia Clark. She had been watching award shows since she was small, and it was a childhood dream to win one. “And to be standing there, with that thing in your hand, looking out at a sea of people, and you go backstage, and it’s a bunch of strangers, then you call your person on the phone, then you’re home or in the hotel room with the thing, and it’s just... this is so weird. It’s not a communal experience, it’s a very isolating experience.”
Her partner, Holland Taylor, was away at the time, doing a play, and Paulson says the whole experience was “sort of lonely, in a weird way”. That’s sad, I say. “It is sort of sad!” she says. “I don’t want it to seem just heartbreaking, because it was glorious, it was a very wild time. But in terms of something I could experience, it felt dropped in, like, this really happened to you, you really did this, this was the response to your work, are you taking this in?” She knows it sounds trite, but she says the real reward was playing Clark in the first place. “Everything that happened around it was just icing and gravy and cherry on top, and all that stuff.”
Where does she keep those gold statues? “They’re in Holland’s house. I think about bringing them here all the time, but I never do. I don’t know, it’s weird.” I assume she and Taylor, who have been a couple since the beginning of 2015, don’t live together. “But we do live together,” she says. “For the whole beginning of the relationship and the last five years, we have lived together.” They just have their own houses, and spend some time apart during the week. “Really, the change happened during the pandemic, which was: we have an opportunity to protect our relationship by spending some time apart, and I think we should do that. We spend more time together than apart, but we do have several nights a week where we’re talking to each other like this [she gestures at the screen] and we get to do what we want, when we want. Both of us are exceedingly independent people.” As two actors, have they got used to spending large periods of time in different cities, doing different jobs? She laughs. “All of a sudden, we were like, ‘Hey! You’re here! What are you doing here? Get outta here!’ It’s been good.”
The internet is wild for Paulson and Taylor as a couple. Whenever they refer to each other in interviews, or on social media, there is a minor explosion of online fuss. “I don’t remember people going nuts about Michael Douglas and
Catherine-Zeta Jones, in terms of their age difference,” she says, with an air of resignation, not unkindly, but firmly. There are 32 years between Paulson and Taylor. “For me, that seems to be the predominant interest in my relationship with Holland, what would be perceived by some as the strangeness of it, or the unlikelihood of it. I think people are fascinated by it, because it’s so not typical. Except for if you look around at plenty of well-known or recognisable couples, when they’re heterosexual couples, it just runs rampant, and I don’t see anybody becoming obsessed by those relationships.”
On the other hand, she says, if it makes other people feel more comfortable in themselves, fine. “If it allows for more freedom, in terms of the way people think about what’s possible for them, then I’m all for the fandom of it and the excitement around it and the interest in it. What I don’t love, which is sort of a consequence of it being such public knowledge, is that there is discussion about it at all. Believe me, there have been plenty of young people on the internet who have tweeted horrifying things to me about it, and who don’t support it and who are so cruel. So it’s just a bit of a dance. But one I try to not let into my brain too often.”
When normal life begins to creep back, the first thing Paulson will do is return to Murphy’s next American Crime Story, which this time is taking on the Bill Clinton impeachment. She will play Linda Tripp, the Pentagon employee who secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky confiding in her about her sexual relationship with the then-president. Many saw Tripp’s actions as a betrayal of her younger friend; Tripp said she was acting out of patriotic duty. They were about a week away from shooting when production shut down, and she hopes they will start up again in the next few weeks. “For me, playing her is not an opportunity to revise history, it’s just a chance for me to share the underbelly of something that, if we do it right, will at the very least make it possible for you to go, ‘I understand now, what she was doing.’”
Now, what Paulson wants to do is find joy in her job, as much as she can: “Some of the work I’m most well known for is quite dark and quite centred in emotion. And I would love to be able to do that work, and enjoy it, at the same time.” That sounds like a grown-up way to look at it. “I’m trying!” she laughs. “I’m trying to shed the six-year-old, and grow into the 45-year-old. She’s here!”