Suffering for her art

Sarah Paulson revives an iconic movie villain in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Ratched, writes Michele Manelis

SHE’S the woman Ryan Murphy turns to for his regular TV creep fests.

First, there was Sarah Paulson’s compelling performances across nine seasons of his anthology series American Horror Story. Now, her latest opportunity to play crazy comes as the deranged nurse in Ratched. Inspired by the iconic character in the 1975 film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Paulson admits she had to dig even deeper into her bag of mental tricks to play the pathological part.

“Ryan has had me do some pretty harrowing things over the years,” Paulson tells The Guide with a chuckle, including “going through conversion therapy, as well as using coat hangers in unmentionable places.”

Even the more benign role of lawyer Marcia Clarke in American Crime Story: The People v. O.J.

Simpson left the actress wondering whose side the uber producer was on.

“I mean, what about Marcia’s wig? What more does he want me to do to make me feel humiliated and embarrassed?” she laughs.

Joking aside, Paulson’s meticulous preparation for her latest role, as well as the intensity of her collaboration with Murphy, proved the most enjoyable part of the research process, she says.

“I re-watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest before we started and absolutely thought of Nurse Ratched as a villain, no question. And then with the series, I realised that the audience is going to have trouble with her, but that’s what she’s there for,” Paulson says.

“Actually, Nurse Ratched is often named along with Hannibal Lecter when people make those lists of greatest cinematic villains.”

Louise Fletcher played the notorious nurse in the film, earning her the 1976 Academy Award for Best Actress – “very big shoes to fill,” Paulson admits.

“It’s something that casts a very large shadow for me in terms of how to make it my own,” she says, adding with more levity, “so, no pressure.”

Set in California in the 1940s, the set design and backdrops were impeccable facsimiles of the era.

But they are eclipsed by the horrific scenes which recreate the routine practices and goings-on in such clinics.

Experimenting on their patients, lobotomies were among the painful “therapies” performed by doctors on patients, to rid them of various kinds of mental maladies, such as homosexual tendencies.

The 45-year-old openly gay actor, who lives with 77-year-old star Holland Taylor, explains:

“A lot of the things that we now consider barbaric were considered to be cutting-edge therapies at the time.”

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