{"id":5283,"date":"2017-11-01T00:28:09","date_gmt":"2017-11-01T00:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/?p=5283"},"modified":"2018-11-03T00:34:29","modified_gmt":"2018-11-03T00:34:29","slug":"sarah-paulson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/sarah-paulson\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Paulson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Actors can be hard to interview. They can recite a perfect press-release answer, twisted and buffed and polished, until you barely recognize what you asked them about in the first place. It can be hard to get behind a facade so solid.<\/p>\n

Sarah Paulson is not one of these actors.<\/p>\n

When she speaks on the phone from LA, it is raw and real. Paulson talks about truth, above all: in court, in acting, in oneself. She talks fast, laughs easily, and she thinks about things deeply. At 41, she has spent a life building up a career and a fame she knows could be fleeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a very good friend named Pedro Pascal and he had a similar thing with Game of Thrones,\u201d she says. After years of pounding the pavement and not getting the roles he needed, his career rocketed following his appearance in that show. \u201cHe and I talk about how grateful we are that [the success] happened when it did. We are so aware of how rare these kinds of things are, how hard fought they were for both of us, that we don\u2019t take any of it for granted. Nothing about it is common place, nothing about it is ordinary, nothing about it is just a typical day when you\u2019re just hanging out on set with Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a very extraordinary, lucky thing that is rare. Rarified rare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if you haven\u2019t consciously watched a Paulson film or TV show, you have definitely seen her work. She fills her roles so completely that she herself disappears. She\u2019s so versatile that there is also no one categorical \u201cSarah Paulson character:\u201d she has played a slave-owner\u2019s violent wife in 12 Years a Slave, a Christian actress in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, she\u2019s played smart, dumb, crazy, drug-addicted, and complicated, and as an audience we \u2014 for the most part \u2014 knew almost nothing about Paulson as a person. Operating under the radar for the greatest part of her career, Paulson has been the blank slate we needed her to be.<\/p>\n

She says it\u2019s useful place to be: as an actor, you can inhabit a character completely without the baggage that being human in the world brings along. She worries that narrow-minded audience members won\u2019t be able to stretch their minds and believe an actor in a role the more they know about them as a person. She mentions Marion Cottilard in Le Vie En Rose, which Paulson regards as one of the greatest performances of all time. When it was released in 2007, we knew almost nothing about Cottilard personally. All we had was the perfect Edith Piaf she presented on the screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of what was so brilliant about it was that nobody \u2014 Americans, anyway \u2014 had anything to ascribe to her. You were able to completely submerge yourself and believe that she was Edith Piaf. If she had been an incredibly well known actress, would it have been a bigger feat?\u201d<\/p>\n

This blank mystery was something Paulson could draw on before, but no longer: her fame has levelled up. American Horror Story was big, but American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson was a phenomenon. Everything down to Paulson\u2019s private life has become fair game. Although, she says, her romantic life was never a closed door \u2014 it\u2019s just that nobody really cared until she was publicly dating a woman (Broadway actress Cherry Jones, in 2005). Paulson outed herself accidentally.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe won a Tony Award, I kissed her, and all of a sudden I was outed,\u201d she says. \u201cI didn\u2019t really think about it in that way at the time \u2014 I was just doing what one would do when a person they love has just won a big fat acting prize.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat am I gonna do, pat her on the back and say \u2018good job, dude?\u2019 It didn\u2019t occur to me to do anything but what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Afterwards, the phonecalls came. Her sexuality became \u201ca thing\u201d. Paulson wasn\u2019t sure where the chips would land. She had just signed up to play Harriet Hayes in Aaron Sorkin\u2019s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip \u2014 a very conservative Christian woman who was, in the course of the series, going to be in from from the gay community for going on The 700 Club, flagship show of CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network. Paulson worried that she was going to get fired.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had anxiety. I was worried somehow that there was going to be some fallout if Aaron [Sorkin] or anyone on the show knew that I was with Cherry. [But] on my very first day, when we met to do the table read for Studio 60, Aaron walked right up to me and says, \u2018I didn\u2019t know you were with Cherry Jones, that\u2019s so wonderful. I just want you to know that you\u2019re safe here. You never have anything to worry about. You\u2019re safe here.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the biggest exhale of my life. I didn\u2019t realise how anxious about it I had been until he said that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did the experience help in her role of Marcia Clark, in portraying the experience of having nudes leaked to the magazines, and a constant, suffocating media interest in every piece of her life?<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t help but feel a kind of kinship in terms of being looked at. But there was so much celebration about my relationship. So much so that I thought: Jesus, did everyone just assume I was going to be alone forever with 500 cats?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that everyone should be allowed to speak their truth and just say what they want to say and show the world who they are. You should be able to love whomever you fucking well please.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lately the newfound interest in Paulson\u2019s personal life is a combination between career success and the fact that she\u2019s dating a woman who is significantly older than her: Emmy Award-winning actress Holland Taylor, 73. They flirt over Twitter. BuzzFeed compiles lists of their exchanges. Paulson finds it all kind of funny.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that everyone should be allowed to speak their truth and just say what they want to say and show the world who they are,\u201d she says. \u201cYou should be able to love whomever you fucking well please.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marcia Clark never got her dues when she was lead prosecutor in the case against OJ Simpson. In a world before social media, her work in the trial was broadcast live across America, packaged into highlights internationally, and she was torn apart in magazines, talk shows, in print and on our screens. No fringe groups defended her or started a Twitter campaign; there was no Facebook group that she could dip into late at night and know that people cared. In the 20 years since the trial happened, Marcia Clark had not been vindicated \u2014 not properly, not by the wider world \u2014 until Paulson played her on FX\u2019s American Crime Story: The People Vs. OJ Simpson.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember thinking when I first read the script: I don\u2019t know how I\u2019m going to do this,\u201d says Paulson. \u201cI don\u2019t know how she did this. I really drew strength from knowing that this was not something that we were making up. I was trying to imagine what it would be like for someone to go through this \u2014 her divorce and her home life completely falling apart under such intense scrutiny \u2014 and I just thought: if she could do it, I\u2019ve just got to honour her as best I can and hope that some respect gets thrown at her. I\u2019ve just got to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the harrowing scene where Marcia walks into the courtroom with her new haircut \u2014 when John Travolta as Robert Shapiro gives her a sarcastic thumbs up \u2014 Clark, crushed and deflated, became our hero. When the checkout guy saw her buying Tampax and commented that the defence was going to have a bad day, there wasn\u2019t a woman in front of their TV who didn\u2019t want to leap inside it and strangle him.<\/p>\n

Marcia, Marcia Marcia. We\u2019re so sorry.<\/p>\n

When asked if she\u2019s ever experienced any similar degree of sexism in her career, Paulson takes it back to a hairstyle. \u201cThe only thing I\u2019ve experienced that is not only sexist, but offensive to me on a human level is that any time I\u2019ve ever been asked to portray the leading lady, I\u2019ve auditioned as a brunette and have always been asked to make my hair blonde. Somehow my brown hair didn\u2019t have the same allure, the same sex appeal, the same power, that a blonde would have. It wasn\u2019t even a subterranean message: it was overt.\u201d She sighs. \u201cWhat a way to communicate to somebody that how they come into the world is not enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Talk to anyone over 35 about The People vs. OJ Simpson and too many of them will wave their hand and say they can\u2019t bear to watch it, they lived through it: they can\u2019t see those faces on TV again. The thing that makes it work \u2014 the reality of it, the insanity of it \u2014 it the same thing that\u2019s turning others off. It\u2019s too close. The series looks like a 90s TV movie because they got the 90s so horrifyingly right, from the brown suits right down to the gender and racial politics that dominated a story that should have been about two people dying.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a show so easy to become obsessed by. It never explicitly says OJ did it, but we know OJ did it: there\u2019s no one else who could have done it. But that wasn\u2019t the point. Throughout this story, OJ was just an empty vessel at the heart of an enormous cultural battle. The show isn\u2019t a whodunnit, it\u2019s helping us see how a baffling verdict came to be.<\/p>\n

Paulson wasn\u2019t glued to her screen when the trial was originally broadcast: she was a 19-year-old actress in New York City. \u201cI was very confused by the whole thing,\u201d she says. \u201cI did not know OJ Simpson as a football star, or a hero in that way, I only knew him as the actor from the Naked Gun movies. I wish I could say I had some kind of grand stand of \u2018I\u2019m not watching this circus act that surrounds a really terrible, terrible crime\u2019 but I was beginning my acting my acting career in New York. I was just trying to get a job.\u201d<\/p>\n

At her core, Paulson is not a star: she is an actress. She\u2019s willing to get dirty and mean and ugly, and she is hungry as hell to perform roles that demand something bigger from her, something real, something outside of pretty. The role of Marcia Clark was so real she doubted she had the ability to do it justice. Executive producer Ryan Murphy, who co-created American Horror Story, didn\u2019t have her audition for it: he believed so strongly that she had it in her he didn\u2019t need to check.\u201cHe said, \u2018You\u2019re doing it whether you wanna do it or not\u2019. Usually when Ryan has that idea it\u2019s really best just to listen to it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

So Paulson ended up watching the OJ trial, 20 years after it happened, on her iPad in the courtroom set for The People Vs. OJ Simpson, trying to capture every nuance of the character that she could. When the cameras started to roll, Paulson would throw her iPad and headphones under the prosecutor\u2019s table and become Marcia Clark.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t meet Clark in real life until the filming was mostly completed, the reason being that there are so many different angles to the story that Paulson didn\u2019t want to cross-pollinate. She wanted to keep true to the words in the script.<\/p>\n