\n<\/p>\n
Sarah Paulson still doesn\u2019t fully understand why fans call her \u201cmother.\u201d<\/p>\n
At first, when she started seeing the word used online to describe her, she was bewildered and a bit irritated. She was in her 40s and childless. Did these people really think she looked like their mother<\/em>?<\/p>\n Once she began to understand it as an age-neutral compliment \u2014 a term Gen Z likes to use for famous women they adore \u2014 she leaned into<\/a> the meme, appearing on \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d last year, alongside Pedro Pascal, in a sketch<\/a> in which he was \u201cfather\u201d and she \u201cmother\u201d to a group of enamored high schoolers.<\/p>\n \u201cHow did this happen to us?\u201d Paulson wondered about her and Pascal, a longtime friend. \u201cWe were two 18-year-old kids who used to go to Sheep Meadow and smoke pot and go see Peter Weir movies. How did we become the mother and father of children on the internet?\u201d<\/p>\n For Paulson, the answer is a 30-year career that has wound its way from television bit parts to meaty lead roles as fraught real-life people. It is animated by an eclectic cast of characters orchestrated by the television producer Ryan Murphy, including conjoined twins, a Craigslist psychic, a ghost with a past as a heroin addict, an evil nurse and two of the most ridiculed and obsessed-over women<\/a> of the 1990s.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Paulson has long dared to play characters that viewers are liable to dislike \u2014 or downright loathe \u2014 and the role that has led to her first Tony nomination is one of her most provocative yet.<\/p>\n In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins\u2019s family drama \u201cAppropriate<\/a>,\u201d her character is often the one audience members are rooting against: a sharp-tongued elder sister who lashes out against mounting suspicions that her recently deceased father harbored racist convictions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On a sunny Monday afternoon, Paulson recounted the arc of her career on a bench in Washington Square Park, not far from the rental where she has been living during the play\u2019s run with her three dogs.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a time when I thought it needed to look like one thing in order to be deemed successful,\u201d said Paulson, who, on her day off, was wearing sweats, conditioner in her hair and a few pimple patches on her face. She added: \u201cI thought if you\u2019re not Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock, you might as well just hang it up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Paulson, 49, never quite hit the rom-com stride, but she has made it to leading-lady status through an altogether different path. Her best-known roles have been publicly reviled women: Marcia Clark, the relentlessly dissected lead prosecutor, in \u201cThe People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,\u201d and Linda Tripp, the meddling confidante to Monica Lewinsky, in \u201cImpeachment: American Crime Story,\u201d about Lewinsky\u2019s affair with President Bill Clinton.<\/p>\n And then some of her characters have been certifiably deranged. She tapped into profound odiousness to play a plantation owner\u2019s wife in \u201c12 Years a Slave<\/a>.\u201d And in \u201cRatched<\/a>,\u201d she gave the \u201cOne Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest\u201d nurse new depths of cruelty.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m more settled in the idea that I have a career I\u2019m proud of, albeit an unconventional one,\u201d Paulson said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The actor\u2019s character in \u201cAppropriate\u201d is no spoonful of sugar either. Gathered with her siblings in Arkansas to sort through their father\u2019s possessions, Toni Lafayette is clinging to the memory of a beloved parent, despite evidence that he was not the man she thought he was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Throughout the play, Toni mocks, taunts, provokes and hurls grievances. When her siblings fight back, she ratchets up the volume, the tendons in Paulson\u2019s neck visibly straining.<\/p>\n \u201cThe point is to eviscerate so that no one can come back at her with anything because they no longer have any limbs,\u201d Paulson explained from the park bench, before picking up one of her dogs, a small scraggly-haired mutt named George, and cradling him like a baby.<\/p>\n Some actors avoid playing objectionable people, concerned about being pigeonholed into villainhood, or that in the audience\u2019s impressionable minds, their character\u2019s likability might blur with their own. Paulson, for example, recalls that to some of her actor friends, the \u201c12 Years a Slave\u201d role was too vile to pursue.<\/p>\n Paulson said those kinds of thoughts haven\u2019t occurred to her. She said she often found herself simply saying yes to roles she was offered in order to keep working, resulting in a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of striking variety.<\/p>\n \u201cMy hope is that it creates a path for longevity that is not attached to beauty or age or sexuality,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen all of those things continue to fall away, maybe it won\u2019t matter so much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n PAULSON LIKES TO SAY <\/strong>that if her mother hadn\u2019t moved her out of Tampa, Fla., as a child, she would still be an actor, but perhaps at a Disney theme park.<\/p>\n When Paulson was about 5, her mother relocated her and her younger sister to New York City to pursue a career as a writer. Her mother, Catharine Clarke, was in her mid-20s, recently split from Paulson\u2019s father and in an unfamiliar city. She found work as a waitress at Sardi\u2019s, a Broadway haunt next door to the theater where \u201cAppropriate\u201d opened last December.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Paulson attended LaGuardia High School, the performing arts school that inspired the movie and TV series \u201cFame,\u201d surrounding her with the earnest creativity of young dancers, sculptors and actors. She decided against college, quickly landing her first Broadway role, in which she understudied for Amy Ryan in \u201cThe Sisters Rosensweig,\u201d and a small part in an episode of \u201cLaw & Order.\u201d<\/p>\n In the first decade or so of her career, she played side characters in the kind of romantic comedies she had dreamed of starring in \u2014 Mel Gibson\u2019s assistant in \u201cWhat Women Want,\u201d Ren\u00e9e Zellweger\u2019s book editor in \u201cDown With Love\u201d \u2014 and she landed lead roles in several television series that never<\/a> quite<\/a> stuck<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Paulson was nearing 30 when she first started working with Murphy, who wrote her into an episode of his medical drama \u201cNip\/Tuck\u201d<\/a> as a patient feigning stigmata. In Murphy, Paulson found a champion who would write her role after ambitious role, particularly in his series \u201cAmerican Horror Story\u201d and then in \u201cAmerican Crime Story,\u201d relishing her openness to the instability and experimentation of character acting.<\/p>\n \u201cOne minute she\u2019s playing a heroin addict and the next she\u2019s playing Mamie Eisenhower,\u201d said Murphy, who said he considers Paulson like a sister. \u201cShe desperately wants to challenge her talent.\u201d<\/p>\n There was only one role that Murphy recalls Paulson not saying yes to: the guidance counselor in \u201cGlee.\u201d Murphy said he wrote it for her, but Paulson had already booked another job.<\/p>\n It was on one of Murphy\u2019s shows that Paulson had what became a career-defining role as Clark, the O.J. Simpson prosecutor. Her sensitive and considered portrayal helped spur conversation about the way Clark was treated in the \u201990s by the public and the media, which picked apart her appearance and published a leaked topless photo of her. The performance not only won Paulson critical acclaim and an Emmy, it gave her a level of pickiness over her future roles that she had never had before.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Paulson speaks of Clark adoringly, and she can be fiercely protective of her.<\/p>\n Midway through the production, she met with Clark to express that the show planned to do right by her; the women still keep in touch, and traded text messages when Simpson died last month. (\u201cI didn\u2019t shed a tear,\u201d Paulson said of his death, though she said she did have sympathy for his family\u2019s loss.)<\/p>\n When Paulson took on her next 1990s tabloid epic \u2014 the Clinton scandal \u2014 she and her movement coach pored over footage of Tripp, seeking to mimic her mannerisms, such as the way she fixed her hair and leaned in to share some gossip, and practicing her walk around Paulson\u2019s backyard pool in Los Angeles. The reviews were markedly<\/a> less positive<\/a> than of her portrayal of Clark, but Paulson said it\u2019s the role of which she\u2019s proudest.<\/p>\n The show didn\u2019t exactly spark a mea culpa from Tripp\u2019s critics, and Paulson acknowledges that Tripp\u2019s actions \u2014 which included secretly recording<\/a> her phone calls with Lewinsky and turning the tapes over to an independent prosecutor \u2014 were not above reproach. But however misguided some of her decisions were, the actress has empathy for what she sees as Tripp\u2019s central motivation: to expose what she saw as an abuse of power.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is something potentially noble in a woman making unapologetic choices because they believe them to be the right ones,\u201d Paulson said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Around the time that filming concluded on the Clinton season in 2021, Paulson was offered \u201cAppropriate,\u201d which would become her first stage role in a decade, since an Off Broadway production of \u201cTalley\u2019s Folly\u201d<\/a> in 2013.<\/p>\n Directed by Lila Neugebauer and produced by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, \u201cAppropriate\u201d debuted late last year at the Helen Hayes Theater to critical praise and strong ticket sales. In March it moved to the Belasco, where it is running as a commercial production through June 23.<\/p>\n To prepare for the play, Paulson worked closely with her movement coach, Julia Crockett, who helped her locate the physical dynamics of Toni, a divorc\u00e9e enraged by the sudden appearance of her absent brother just as their father\u2019s estate is slated to go up for sale.<\/p>\n One source of inspiration for Toni\u2019s expressions was Meredith Marks, a cast member on \u201cThe Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,\u201d whose verbal sparring match with one of her co-stars went viral<\/a>. \u201cShe\u2019s got this willingness to go there, like, \u2018I will fight if you want to fight,\u2019\u201d Crockett said of the clip, which came from a scene that Paulson and Crockett studied. \u201cAnd there\u2019s something that she did with her eyebrows and her eyes that I really loved. She kind of pulled her head back and had this scoff that we worked a lot with.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Crockett said she and Paulson have collaborated so closely on her roles that they now share a kind of secret language of metaphors. For Toni, one of the central metaphors of her physicality is a bowling ball that has been hurled down an alley. For a scene in the second act in which Toni is drunk and significantly more pacified, Crockett told Paulson, \u201cImagine the bowling ball just turns into a potato.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAnd she walked away and did it,\u201d Crockett said.<\/p>\n Paulson\u2019s attention to detail and feeling of responsibility for her roles can be obsessive: at one point, Crockett was living with Paulson in Greenwich Village so they could rehearse in the morning and at night. But there have also been moments of abandon.<\/p>\n Elle Fanning, who originally starred alongside Paulson in the play as Toni\u2019s brother\u2019s sage-burning fianc\u00e9e, recalled one performance in which the actors realized that a poodle-like dog was sitting in the audience when it started barking. \u201cWe just looked at each other and we started hysterically laughing,\u201d Fanning said.<\/p>\n For the Tony Awards in June, the category in which Paulson has been nominated \u2014 best leading actress in a play \u2014 carries echoes of a time much earlier in her career.<\/p>\n It was during the announcement of that award, at the Tonys in 2005, that Paulson first came out publicly as being in a relationship with a woman, when her girlfriend at the time, the actress Cherry Jones, won the award for her performance in \u201cDoubt.\u201d Paulson, who was seated beside her, kissed Jones<\/a> ahead of her acceptance speech, something that she later described as instinctual and not intended to broadcast their relationship to the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nearly two decades later, Paulson, now in a long-term relationship with the actress Holland Taylor, will be the one in the camera\u2019s focus as the Tonys envelope is opened.<\/p>\n Speaking from the bench in Washington Square Park, in between waves of giddy recognition from fans passing by, Paulson acknowledged that like many of her previous characters, Toni is not likely to be viewed as a heroine. By intermission, her family has lobbed accusations at her of being \u201cradioactive,\u201d \u201cdisgusting\u201d and \u201csick.\u201d In his review<\/a> of the play, The Times\u2019s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, described Toni this way: \u201cThink of the worst person you know: the kind who blabs people\u2019s secrets, mocks their diction, dismisses their pain while making festivals of her own.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLiking\u201d Toni is far from the point. But Paulson hopes that by the end of the play, after learning why Toni is the way she is, the audience feels at least something of a softening toward her.<\/p>\n \u201cMy hope,\u201d Paulson said, \u201cis that there\u2019s a fully realized person up there that you can have some connectivity to, even if only for a fleeting second.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n