Sarah Paulson Talks Linda Tripp

When she took on the role of Linda Tripp in Impeachment, the latest installment of the FX anthology American Crime Story, Sarah Paulson had previous experience playing a real person. In fact, she had won an Emmy for her performance as prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark in the first ACS saga, 2016's The People v. O.J. Simpson.

Of course, no two human beings are alike, so Tripp — who befriended, and later betrayed, Monica Lewinsky after learning of the former White House intern's relationship with President Bill Clinton — presented an entirely new challenge.

Which, for Paulson, made the role even more appealing.

"I'm drawn to playing people who have not been carved out of some pure, fine marble or some very polished stone," she says. "I'm much more interested in playing people who are human beings. And by that, I mean imperfect. Complicated."

Emmy contributor Margy Rochlin spoke with Paulson shortly before Impeachment finished shooting in Los Angeles.

Where are you right now?
I'm in my trailer. Wearing a black and white checked dress, knees pulled up to chest.

How did you hear about Impeachment?
It usually works that I hear from [ACS co-creator and co-executive producer] Ryan [Murphy] that there's something he feels he'd like to see me do or would like my contributions to. With this one, there'd been talk long ago about doing it. Meaning pre-Covid times. We were supposed to start shooting this in March of 2020. So, I started prepping for it in November of 2019. When I say long ago, two years before that, I was in a conversation about what would be the third installment, which would be [about Hurricane] Katrina. That went away, and we started talking about this story being the next installment.

But then it kind of went away, too. It seemed that they couldn't find a writer that was interpreting the story in a way that they felt was good enough. That particular franchise, the Crime Story franchise, is operating at a very high level. Who knows if we [would] succeed? But we were looking for an elevated experience all around.

So, they were looking for a writer who could really do it. That took a long time. The last I heard was that it wasn't going to happen. Then I got a text from Ryan at, like, ten o clock at night, and it said, "The Crime Story script came in great." And I was so confused because it had been so long, and I thought it was not happening. I said, "What do you do mean?" He said, "The Crime Story script. Impeachment. It's great."

I was confused, and I got on the phone with him, and he said, "It's great. I want to send it to you." I had no idea that we had gone from "It's not happening" to they were still having writers figure out what they were going to do. Then they chose a writer who wrote something really great.

I read it, and I really kid you not — and [Impeachment writer] Sarah Burgess, if she was sitting here, would be so mortified — but I closed the script, and I thought it was one of the best things I'd ever read. Then I gave it to [Paulson's partner] Holland [Taylor], and she closed the script and said, "I think that's one of the best things I've ever read." And I just couldn't believe I was going to get to do it. I couldn't believe he was going to let me play this part. I just couldn't believe it. It was so fully formed on the page in a way that I thought, "Oh, God."

I think I still operate from an acting place of, "If they're coming to me, then it can't be that good." You know? It's that old story of by the time you get offered something, all the greats have turned it down. That's my own psychology to wade through. (Laughs)

From the beginning, talks were always about you playing Linda Tripp?
Always.

What appealed to you about playing her?
It's complicated because I'm conflating my Marcia Clark experience and Linda Tripp, and they're different. But from an acting standpoint, I feel similarly about the undertaking. People always talk about, "How did you choose to play this?" And I'm like, "I didn't choose to play this. I auditioned. This was the job available to me, and I did it."

This idea of creating a career, for some people it may be curated. I don't know many actors who feel that way, so I've been very lucky I've been able to play in my career — and both times with Ryan — a person who is...I guess what I'm trying to say, and not very succinctly, is that I'm drawn to playing people who have not been carved out of some pure, fine marble or some very polished stone. I'm much more interested in playing people who are human beings. And by that, I mean imperfect. Complicated. That, to me, is a far more interesting way to spend one's time as an actor than playing heroines and heroes.

I was just drawn to everything about her — the physical-transformation component, the complicated reality of who she was and what she did, how to reverse engineer internally for me, how to figure out why someone would make that choice and how to get behind it.

Watching the show, I started thinking that many of the characters in Impeachment, over time, have had the ability to explain themselves or to recontextualize themselves. The one person who couldn't quite bridge that is Linda Tripp, and because of that, it makes her one of the richest characters.
I think that's very well put and very true. Obviously, with Marcia [Clark], it was clearer on the page, and from what I read about her, there was a gross misunderstanding between the public and their perception of her and who she really was.

This is a little more complicated than that, but as you said, she didn't write a book. The book she did write, even though Sarah Burgess and I had a lot of talks about this book, came out posthumously. [Tripp's] co-writer finished it. There was a lot of it that I read where I thought, "This isn't Linda." (Laughs)

We're still filming. I'm finished on Wednesday. It will be one of the hardest things in the world to say goodbye to playing her. First and foremost, I've never played a person for so long. I started prepping in November of 2019, and then we didn't start shooting until November of 2020. And we're still shooting. I've never done something that lasted that long that wasn't a play. And we're shooting in this kind of order. So, by the time we're done, we're at the end of her story as it pertains to Impeachment. So, it's been a wild thing.

You had to gain weight for the part, and when it didn't start, you had to stay at that weight, yes?
Yeah, I did.

What did you do to prepare?
You know, this topic is so complicated. I'm already aware that there's a conversation percolating about wearing a body-enhancing suit underneath my clothes and things. Here's the brass tacks of it: I gained 30 pounds. I did have to maintain that while we were waiting to find out if we were shooting. I am also wearing a little less than a five-pound suit underneath my clothes.

I haven't gained 30 pounds before in my life. This is a new experience for me. I have no idea where the weight is going to go. The main thing is, if you look at pictures of Linda when she was younger, even as a young adult on the beach, her body shape is just very different from mine. It has nothing to do with weight — literally nothing. She was a tall, lithe woman at this time in her life. Her shape was different. My neck is much longer. So, we created a body suit chiefly to shorten the length of my neck and broaden my shoulders. So that's really what it was and what I've done and what I've been doing.

But I shaved my eyebrows so I could create her eyebrow shape. The weight gain is something that will live on me a lot longer than the show, probably, because it will take some time to live in a body that's someone's body.

How did you do it?
I just ate. I ate some food. I ate more food. I worked with a person to help me eat more food than I burned. I certainly didn't want to do anything dangerous for my body. I didn't go buck wild.

More than anything, the weight gain just felt like it was part of my job. If I'm going to play a person who looks different than I do, I'd like to do what I can to make that more real. So that wasn't a hardship for me.

I couldn't recognize you in the performance.
I worked with a movement coach named Julia Crockett, who came to me through Emmy Rossum, who was working with her on [the upcoming Peacock limited series] Angelyne. Emmy and I are developing something together and we were talking about all this and what all this was like and prosthetics and being a real person. She's obviously very young to play Angelyne, as well. She said, "I have someone so wonderful." It was the greatest gift I've ever been given.

I have a different walk than Linda. There's a lot of video of Linda walking in and out of her house during that time, because the press was always on her front lawn. So, I could watch allll of it. I worked with a voice teacher. My movement teacher was with me every single day. It was all about collapsing my chest. We had a phrase called "Boobs on bel," meaning my boobs on my belly to try to collapse my body and then also stick my neck out so I got more of a hunch. It just changed everything that I do.

I'm glad you didn't see my gestures because [my movement teacher] was constantly, "Stop flapping your hands. That's you. Don't flap your hands." So, I'd be much more pointed with the way I used my fingers. But that was the first time for me, working with someone whose eyes were there specifically for my Linda-isms. We worked together a long time at my house before walking around my backyard as Linda in different costumes that I had the [wardrobe] department bring over to me. She had me do things like drive around town as Linda, which I did.

As an actor, those are the kinds of things you dream about as a child. It's like the transformational component since Shakespeare — different people playing different parts and a company of actors just swapping and doing different things all the time. I just love the transformational part of this. I think of myself as a character actress. I'm a character actress who sometimes gets to play a leading lady. This was so exciting, to drop down a rabbit hole.

As I keep saying to Ryan, it felt like a very big swing that I was taking. It was like, he called me up to bat and said, "Okay, you wanna do this? Go ahead," and then [in a high, sing-song child's voice] "Ooooh. I don't know. Can I do it?" It was really scary. It continues to be scary.

We talked about the big swing a lot. As an actor, you are only as good as your opportunities. I've said this before, I have so many friends who are so gifted who have not been given opportunities. They're capable of all kinds of things that no one even knows. For some reason Ryan wants to have me push myself. The pursuit of truth, trying to embody another character, physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally is why I want to be an actor. So, this was one of the most extraordinary opportunities I've ever had in my life.

Did you talk to Monica about Linda Tripp?
Monica and I, I can say pretty confidently, have become good friends. Which is a wonderful gift of this experience. I personally — and this is nothing that Monica has done or said — but I feel very very mindful about prying into Monica's experience of Linda for my benefit. I think it's a real source of complicated feeling. The last thing I'd want to do is hungrily bother her for tidbits and clues. We talked a little bit about it. But I've always been very, very mindful to not overstep in that way. So I didn't push. She said a couple of things to me that were interesting and helpful.

What about Sarah Burgess? She's so encyclopedic.
I couldn't have done this without her. Linda and all the characters are so alive on the page, and that, I think, is rare. She was working on this for, I think, three years. She'd been so immersed in this world for so long. Yes, she is a source that I'd always go to. But she would sometimes come to me and say, "Listen, in this scene I was thinking we could have some of your Christmas decorations out. What do you think?" She'd ask my opinion in this way that felt so wonderful and collaborative.

We have kind of locked arms around Linda, in a way, that is buoying. It is not uncomplicated to play a person who does something that you have real opinions about — even by the end of this thing, I have come to what she was thinking.

Can you talk about that?
My belief is that Linda Tripp wanted to matter. She wanted to matter in the way that every person wants to matter. Not just in their own lives, but wants to feel a part of something — and I mean that kind of innocently. Like a normal human desire to belong. And you add into that a person who is working in the West Wing, working alongside major players in the administration and then having felt sort of wounded by being banished from the Pentagon and someone less skilled than she being promoted. It felt obvious to her.

Then I think what ultimately happens is that Linda is both horrified and titillated about what's going on with Monica. She is one of those persons who doesn't know how to integrate the feeling and put it in a place that's livable. She felt compelled to take action.

At the end of the day, I feel like Linda got on a train of her making. Like she caused a lot of this. But I truly believe — and I'll believe this forever, and no one can tell me different — she did not ultimately know where the train was going to go. And it started going very fast and moving with players.

But the time we get to episode nine, she was so out over her skis and didn't know it. And wasn't at first, and then was. And she couldn't stop it. I do believe in my heart that she did not know how hideous it would be for Monica. We have to remember after Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Clinton's approval ratings were still through the roof. In the end, these were women, as Linda says — not my personal belief, but Linda's belief — Monica grew up in a wealthy, upper-middle-class home with parents who adored her, doted on her, went to a good school and was very well loved and well cared for. Unlike some of the other women who Bill had his dalliances with, that was not always the case.

Linda decided somehow that Monica would be fine because most of these other women who hurled these accusations against the president were from a different class. And that was a shortcoming in Linda's ability to hold all this stuff. But I think she imagined that Monica was too privileged to have anything befall her in a real way. Then, by the time it became clear that that was not the case, it was too late. And there was nothing she could do to take it back.

So, to come full circle to what you talked about never explaining herself, I think ultimately, she doubled down and decided that she did something for more pure reasons. I don't think she was able to access the part of herself to say, "I made a terrible mistake thinking that Monica was going to come out of this alive, and I made a terrible mistake thinking this was an okay thing to do because I was only doing it for the good of the country and would not have consequences that would be irrevocable and life changing."

She didn't think about that — and by the time she did, it was too late.

I think of her like a horse at a race, with blinders on, and she's only looking at one thing. She's blinded to the other realities, and I think self-induced. I think she needed to believe what she needed to believe to do what she thought was right and what she needed to do to both matter and to also take care of something she believed in. We learn about this later, in episode ten, about her own father and what some of this was about in terms of what she can't manage and stand by.

So that's a very long-winded answer. But I do think it is very easy to look at it from a very one-dimensional way, that she was just a bad friend. It was so more complicated than that. And she did do a bad thing. I don't know if she ever admitted that to herself. I don't know what a person does knowing that. How do you incorporate that into your daily life?

When you're a pariah.
When you're a pariah. You're probably just holding on to what you have to believe, to what the reasons are that you did what you did. I do believe that those seeds of reasoning for her were ultimately much purer than what they either became or what she had to lean into to live with it.

One last question. Can you address this production from the perspective of someone who has worked with Ryan Murphy many, many times?
I can only compare it to O.J., because I was not part of [2018's The Assassination of Gianni Versace], but I never said a line [of dialogue] to Cuba [Gooding Jr., who played Simpson]. We were in the courtroom together all the time, but I never spoke to him. But we were all together much more. All the players, no matter what side you were on, we were in the courtroom together.

It was sort of like what happened to me on [the 2020 FX limited series] Mrs. America. It was the feminists and the conservatives — we were basically never together. So many of us were such good friends outside of that production. It was always like, "I'm off tomorrow!" "Well, I'm working!" "Well, I'm off today." "Well, I'm working."

But, yeah, I never laid eyes on Clive Owen [who plays Bill Clinton] this entire production. Not on set, not off set. Not on the street. Our paths never crossed on the show, and we never worked on the same day. So, the first six episodes, I'm with Beanie [Feldstein, who plays  Monical Lewinsky] consistently. And after that, we don't have a scene together after episode six. So that was weird, to be so concentrated and with one another, and now I'm off mostly with [Linda's] daughter and my lawyer.

It's just a very different experience. It actually makes it, I don't know, feel like the real thing. Because all these people really had no contact with one another, and yet all these players were affected by one another. They never crossed paths, they never met Linda Tripp or Monica Lewinsky. But they were back there, pulling the puppet strings. I don't know if they ever met Paula Jones!

The interesting thing is how much this was part of their world and how little they actually commingled. In a funny way, it sort of felt like the real thing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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