COVER STORY
Sarah Paulson, Hollywood’s un-boxable star, is our cover girl this month!
‘She’s always honest; there’s never a false note. She’s warm, sexy, incredibly funny and very, very smart. There’s no such thing as“aSarah Paulson type”.’
Sarah Paulson’s astounding ability to completely inhabit every role she takes on, and her insistence on playing the Hollywood game her way, have made her one of the most in-demand actresses in Tinseltown – and at 44 years old, she’s only just hitting her stride.
AWaslthough she’d been working as an actress since 1995, Sarah Paulson always felt that she wasn’t quite getting the ‘right’ roles. ‘I thought success looked like a particular thing,’ she says: ‘You have to have a When Harry Met Sally moment like Meg Ryan, or go from Mystic Pizza to Pretty Woman like Julia Roberts.’ Meanwhile, nobody could quite figure out where Sarah belonged. ‘Was I a leading lady?
I a sidekick? Was I a character actress? No one really knew what to do with me.’ That was partly to do with her quirkiness and humour, and partly to do with her refusal, off-screen, to be anyone other than herself. Four years ago, Sarah’s personal life became a juicy tabloid story when it was revealed that she had been dating actress Holland Taylor, who is 32 years her senior. Holland is best known for her role as Evelyn Harper (Charlie and Alan’s mom) in the long-running sitcom Two and a Half Men.
Sarah describes her relationship with the media as a ‘funny dance’. ‘On one hand, when you’re in a relationship that makes
you happy you would be telling anyone who wanted to know about it. On the other, there’s a sort of meal of it for people. That’s not my favourite thing. But I don’t want to spend my life jumping from shadow to shadow.’
Sarah says that she had never seriously dated anyone her own age and has always gravitated to her elders.
‘I had a 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. And in doing so, I think I developed a very easy rapport with people older than myself.’
While accepting her Emmy for playing prosecutor Marcia Clark in 2016, Sarah memorably called out: ‘Holland Taylor, I love you!’
‘It occurred to me, should I not do that? And then I thought, “Why would I not?” The fact I’m having this thought is wrong. But I had a moment of societal concern, wondering if maybe people who didn’t know that about me would be like, “Wait, what?” But then, you know, I did it anyway.’
Although she is a classic beauty, Sarah’s face has a shape-shifting quality that allows her to morph into people who are damaged, off-putting or cruel.
‘That characteristic, which stopped me from getting jobs when I was younger, is exactly what allows me to get them now,’ she says. ‘But my embracing of it didn’t come out of some wonderful zen perspective – it came out of me asking myself: “Do I want to get on the train that’s leaving the station, or keep sitting here and wait for one that might never come?”
I got on the one that was leaving to see where the ride would take me. And it was the Ryan Murphy express.’
Any project with screenwriter and producer Ryan Murphy at the helm tends to be hugely successful but also just a little off-centre; his CV includes TV shows Nip/Tuck, Glee and the hit series American Horror Story, now heading into its ninth season. Every season of AHS is a self-contained mini-series with its own storyline, and following a different set of characters. To date, Sarah has played 13 characters in AHS, among them a witch headmistress, a medium and conjoined twins Bette and Dot Midler – how’s that for range? And in between filming AHS she also starred in heist flick Oceans 8 and Netflix’s post-apocalyptic thriller Bird Box with Sandra Bullock.
According to Sarah, television is more challenging than both film and theatre. ‘If you see any actor giving a half-decent performance on television they must be very good,’ she says. ‘In the movies you have maybe
While accepting her Emmy for playing Marcia Clark in 2016, Sarah memorably called out: ‘Holland Taylor, I love you!’
three pages of dialogue a day, which is fewer than the amount you’ll get for TV – it’s breakneck pace on TV.
‘In terms of theatre, which is probably my favourite, you spend three to five weeks in rehearsal. You have more time to perfect the performance, even though you can’t always make it perfect. Theatre has a beginning, a middle and an end. You’re constantly discovering things. It’s a very “alive” experience.’
Sarah has played extremely complex characters over the years, often putting her mental health on the line when preparing for roles. ‘That’s an occupational hazard no matter what movie or play or television project you may be working on,’ she admits. ‘There’s always some fun dance you have to do with your own sanity. Sometimes you’re asked to tap into things that you’ve spent a long time trying not to.’ In 2018, Sarah took on the challenging role of psychiatrist Dr Ellie Staple in M Night Shyamalan’s Glass. The psychological thriller/superhero movie is a sequel to Shyamalan’s two previous films, Unbreakable and Split. Superhero flicks, says Sarah, are a ‘relief and a pause for the brain’. ‘The reason this one is so much more unique and more meaningful,’ she continues, ‘is that it’s not coming at you with all of this visual imagery of buildings being blown up and CGI. Glass engages on a more personal level, which makes it special.’
Although Hollywood is finally starting to make a concerted effort to scrap the outdated notion that this genre is just for teenage boys, Glass still stands out for its progressive gender representation. ‘The fact that I’m in this movie and I’m 44 years old and I’m not just playing someone’s mother or wife – that in itself communicates that there has been forward motion,’ Sarah says.
‘There was a time when there really was an expiry date [for actresses]. You’d get to 40 and you’d probably have another five years, maybe, if you were a superstar. Otherwise – good luck to you. I don’t think that’s the case any more. My career is direct evidence of that; my real success has come quite late. In my [entire] working life I’ve had more opportunities in front of me at this age than I’ve ever had before.
‘It can’t be denied that there has been some change. But I don’t think we’ve arrived somewhere where we
can just go, “Oh, let’s exhale and sit down.” I don’t know if that day will ever be upon us. Generationally there has been a wake-up call – younger people are acutely aware of that reality and they want to ensure we never face anything like that again. In terms of this film, I’m not there to be purely someone’s love interest. That’s not even part of the story. The most defining characteristic about Ellie is her mind.’
Sarah is clearly a very busy woman; she has been booked solid after her stirring portrayal of Marcia Clark in The People vs OJ Simpson: American Crime Story in 2015, for which she won a string of awards, among them a Screen Actors Guild Award, an Emmy and a Critic’s Choice Award.
Later this year Sarah takes on The Goldfinch, based on Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name. It tells the story of a young man named Theodore Decker who survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum – an attack that kills his mother. From there, he meets several interesting characters and finds himself living with his deadbeat dad in Vegas. Sarah plays the girlfriend of Theodore’s father, Xandra.
She’s also filming another TV show with Ryan Murphy: Sarah will play Nurse Ratched in the
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest origin story, Ratched.
Her directors rave about her abilities. Murphy praised her incredible versatility. ‘She has a real faculty for being somebody else. If I said, “Sarah, next year you’re going to play Pope Francis,” she’d say, “OK!”’ And Aaron Sorkin, who worked with Sarah on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, calls her ‘effortlessly tough’. ‘She’s always honest; there’s never a false note,’ he said. ‘She’s warm, sexy, incredibly funny and very, very smart. There’s no such thing as
“a Sarah Paulson type”.’
Sarah agrees that her characters have very little in common but that they all share at least one quality: ‘They’re all survivors, in a way.’ Marcia Clark is a perfect example. The prosecutor was heavily scrutinised by the media and relentlessly taunted for her appearance and personal life during the OJ Simpson trial in 1994. ‘To me, her biggest mistake was being so ill-prepared for the onslaught of circus activities surrounding the trial.’
As an actress, Sarah is no stranger to this level of public scrutiny. ‘Every time you go anywhere on the red carpet now there are websites dedicated to picking you apart, like Tom and Lorenzo or whoever those guys are,’ she said. ‘And they are so mean.’