Crazy scary role
PAULSON UNDERTAKES CHALLENGES OF PLAYING ‘ TERRIFYING’ NURSE IN RATCHED
Ratched
Debuts Friday, Netflix
When Sarah Paulson reflects on her career, the 45- yearold actress neatly divides her filmography into two eras: “Before M.C.” and “Post-m. C.”
Those initials belong to Marcia Clark, the prosecutor Paulson portrayed with striking strength and vulnerability in Ryan Murphy’s 2016 limited series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. After two decades of hustling on stage and screen as a respected character actress, Paulson delivered a transcendent performance that yielded an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild prize.
“In terms of the public response to me or awareness of me, it became very different,” Paulson says during a recent video chat from her Los Angeles home.
But with a career-defining role comes the concern that the part could, well, remain career-defining. “You always worry,” she says. “Will people say, ‘ She’s good — but she’ll never be as good as she was as Marcia Clark?’”
In Ratched, Murphy’s Netflix series, Paulson cracks open the mind of psychiatric nurse Mildred Ratched, a character immortalized by Louise Fletcher’s Oscar-winning performance in the 1975 film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Murphy who developed the Nurse Ratched origin story into a full- fledged series saw his longtime collaborator as a natural fit, but asked Paulson to think long and hard about what the part would mean for her career.
Playing the lead role on a serialized show, was a commitment and Murphy also wanted her to take on executive producer responsibilities. He felt the steely character was somewhat against type for Paulson.
“In many ways, this is the hardest part that she’s ever had to play because she couldn’t resort to the thing that she loves to do,” Murphy says. “Sarah always says, ‘ Give me a black tooth and an accent and I’m in heaven.’ But I was interested in what happens if she is required to do something that she’s never done, which is absolute feral stillness and lethalness.” Paulson signed on.
“No one could deny the multi- faceted, multi- dimensional aspects of this role,” Paulson says, “and that there are not a ton of them just hanging off trees that are for women my age, that are this complicated and this nuanced and this rich.”
Set in 1947, a decade before the events of Cuckoo’s Nest, the first season follows Ratched as she schemes her way onto the nursing staff of a top California psychiatric hospital, which has been tasked with evaluating a notorious priest killer ( Finn Wittrock).
Paulson did revisit the film.
“I mean, there is no way to improve upon perfection,” Paulson says. “Louise Fletcher’s performance is so extraordinary that I thought, ‘Oh, this might be really scary.’ When I was younger, I found her terrifying. Of course, on second viewing ... I had to find a way that I could get inside it.”
Paulson says the “spine” of her take on Ratched is all Fletcher, as she went to great pains to re- create her predecessor’s starchy uprightness. But the show also imbues Ratched with previously unexplored empathy by examining past traumas and setting up future hardships. Both plotwise, within the story’s psychiatric facility, and thematically, Ratched proves to be about unlocking a troubled mind.
The role “was something I had to shed, and I hate using sort of actor- y terminology that way, but it is what it is,” Paulson says. “It probably speaks to me not having a particularly finely honed craft or skill that I’m not able to just slide into something, vomit it all out and then say, ‘See you later, I’m on my way home for a cocktail and to read a Cosmopolitan.’ That’s just not how it is for me.”
The show’s sprawling storylines also weave in government machinations, workplace politics, revenge fantasies, sexual intrigue and no small amount of body horror. With its lush sets, monochrome period costumes and candy- coloured lighting, Ratched is visually audacious as well.
As an executive producer on Ratched and full creative partner to Murphy, Paulson helped curate directors for the season’s eight episodes, worked with castmates to dissect scenes she wasn’t in, and made decisions on prop, set and costume choices.
“I wanted the crew to know that she had the power if I wasn’t there,” Murphy says. “She kind of has a photographic memory because she can read a script and then know everybody’s parts. At this point, she’s so technically proficient — she knows every lens, what every crew member does, sometimes even better than they do — that it just felt natural.”
“That’s a pretty heady thing to think about undertaking,” Paulson says of playing Ratched over several seasons. “But, oddly enough, the scaredy cat of the Wild Wild West likes to do the thing that scares her the most.”