Sarah Paulson talks The Goldfinch, her Cate Blanchett double act and why she feared an all-female cast
Sarah Paulson went to great lengths to play the selfish, petty Xandra in The Goldfinch and reveals her surprising fears about signing up for Ocean’s 8.
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Sarah Paulson freely admits she’s attracted to the darker side of human nature.
An Emmy-winner for her role as prosecutor Marcia Clark in true-crime classic The People Vs OJ Simpson, Paulson has also played a thief in Ocean’s 8, an abusive slave owner in 12 Years a Slave and the medium Billie Dean Howard (and other characters) in various incarnations of the always dark and twisted American Horror Story.
“I am interested in what isn’t bright and shiny,” Paulson says. “It doesn’t make me unique, I think all actors are interested in what really motivates a person and really makes them tick. I guess I am not always interested in playing heroines — it feels more authentic to me to endeavour to bring a real human being forward with all the complications that come with being a person — and a lot of it ain’t pretty.”
So when Paulson was reading The Goldfinch — which she says is one of her favourite books of the last decade — of all the many characters in Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller, it was the selfish, petty, hard-drinking prostitute Xandra that literally made her sit bolt upright in bed.
“I just felt like she was incredibly complicated and Donna Tartt drew such an intricate portrait of this person and she felt very real to me,” Paulson says. “And I did say out loud — to no one in particular, I was by myself in bed — if they ever make a movie of this, I would be so desperate to play this part.
“She’s not the most conscious person, not the world’s most generous person, she’s a selfish, greedy kind of sphinx and I really think of her as this kind of feral cat and I had affection for her too.”
The problem for Paulson though, was that director John Crowley, just didn’t see her in the part. Undeterred, Paulson hit the gym, working out six days a week with a personal trainer and watching her diet, as well as going above and beyond to get that Vegas “cocktail waitress” look just right.
“The director had seen me play Marcia Clark and he was very kind and complimentary about my work but was very vocal about not really seeing me in the part of Xandra,” she says. “So I went and got a wig and a spray tan and went pretty hard-core all the way in for an audition to try to win the role because I wanted to be a part of it that desperately.”
Most of Paulson’s scenes in The Goldfinch were with Luke Wilson, oozing sleaze as her inveterate gambler boyfriend, and 14-year-old actor Oakes Fegley, who plays his son. As the younger version of the lead character Theo Decker — Ansel Elgort plays the adult — Paulson says she marvelled at the Fegley’s poise and professionalism.
“There was a shyness that was present in me as a person of that age — I am lucky I can get away with it now — so I am always struck by young people who don’t feel that way and are able to do this kind of work,” she says. “I think it’s really remarkable.”
Paulson also relished the chance to square off against Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman in a key exchange in the drama — and wished they’d had more scenes together. The pair had met on the awards circuit while she was hoovering up gongs for The People Vs OJ Simpson and Kidman was talking up Lion — and Paulson says presenting the Aussie actor with her Big Little Lies Emmy two years ago was a particular treat.
“We had a little conversation at an awards show once that was really warm and she was so generous with me about my work and it was a real ‘pinch me’ moment. It was like ‘oh my goodness, Nicole Kidman knows who I am? I can’t quite wrap my brain around that’.”
In fact, it occurs to Paulson that “I’m having quite a nice year with the Aussies”. In addition to The Goldfinch with Kidman, she’s just finished playing the title role in Netflix’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest inspired Ratched alongside Judy Davis, and is currently filming the women’s rights TV drama Mrs America with a stellar, overwhelmingly female-driven cast that includes Cate Blanchett and Rose Byrne.
When it’s suggested that after making Carol and Ocean’s 8 together, she and Blanchett are starting to look like a package deal, Paulson says with a laugh: “I’ll take it. That’s not a bad person to find yourself working with.”
“I am having a lovely time learning from all the great, great Australian actors. This is the third time I have worked with Cate and it’s a very lovely experience because we have a real work history with one another so there is a real ease and comfort and playfulness that you don’t always get in work environments. Everybody has so much to carry and responsibility that it’s hard to remember to enjoy ourselves when we are working. But she and I have a real lightness and sense of fun that, if I am lucky, permeates what we are doing.”
Paulson says it feels like a particularly rich time to be a woman working in television at the moment, thanks to a proliferation of platforms driving more content and increased willingness on the part of studios to bankroll female driven projects.
“There is so much that I don’t know how anybody gets their lives done with all the things that we are supposed to be watching on television,” she says. “It’s a little overwhelming but I feel very lucky to be alive at a time where there is more interest in telling stories from a female perspective.”
But it was just a few short years ago that Ocean’s 8 was met with trolling from certain darker corners of the internet — and surprisingly Paulson admits that she also had concerns about working with the all-female cast for the spin-off heist movie. She puts her trepidation, which she stresses turned out to be completely unfounded, down to being bombarded with negative images of women’s behaviour on screen over the years.
“We see these stories about women fighting over a shoe in a sale or fighting over the same man,” Paulson says. “A lot of the narratives that were being propagated or talked about in stories for years have been women at each other’s throats and competing for things that another woman had. So the idea had somehow imprinted itself in my psyche that that’s what female relationships are — even though they were not representative of the female relationships that I have had in my life.”
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“I thought ‘oh my god — what if we don’t all get along? What if we are fighting? Or competing?’. It was just an old story that I had never even fostered in myself but I felt had sort of been fed to me and I had gulped down heartily as a young woman growing up in America and thinking that to be a successful woman means you have to be a bitch and a hardass and relentless and all these things that are pejorative.”
The Goldfinch opens on Thursday.