The actor gets candid about the risks she takes, the doubts she wrestles with, and the work that keeps her going.

PHOTOGRAPHY Chantal Anderson
STYLED BY Deborah Afshani

Sarah Paulson FaceTimes from her couch in California while tending to George, one of her three rescue dogs. She is in a simple white tee, no makeup, her short dark hair cresting into a Tilda Swinton–meets–Conan O’Brien pompadour depending on which way it falls. The vibe is warm and casual, but it belies a greater reality. Paulson, with a handful of projects to promote, is feeling nervy. “My natural tendency is to be hysterical about things, good or bad,” she says with a Swintonesque flip. “The other night I was at TIFF [the Toronto International Film Festival] with my agent Hylda Queally, who is the classiest queen, and I couldn’t find my purse for a second, and it was a hair-on-fire thing. Then I found it, and she went, Well, you’re great in a crisis.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that for the past 20 years or so, Paulson, 51, has mastered the art of playing characters who can ratchet up tension to an unnerving degree. Through an ongoing creative partnership with writer, director, producer, and all-around Hollywood provocateur Ryan Murphy, Paulson has embraced drama and gorecore, appearing as conjoined twins, the ghost of a drug addict who sews her victims into a mattress, a witch who blinds herself with garden shears, and other eccentrics. In September, she reprised her role as that witch, Cordelia Goode, in American Horror Story: 13. By the time Episode 7 aired on FX in October, Goode’s coven of Salem-era sorceresses was engaged in a murderous showdown with a band of serial killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer. The time-space continuum knows no bounds in the Murphyverse.

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In&nbsp;Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, another Murphy juggernaut that premiered on Netflix in September, Paulson played convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos, one of several figures whose stories unfold across different timelines and intersect throughout the series. To nail the character’s physicality, she spent a weekend cramming—watching Wournos’s trial tapes and practicing her “wild” mannerisms with movement coach Julia Crockett. Her first scene as Wuornos, set in 1980s Florida, culminates in a violent, blood-splattering death for a john who abused her. “When you’re doing take after take after take, you’re kind of going, Wow, this is making me feel insane,” she says, joking that she felt game to tackle Hamlet after the experience. “It just makes you feel like you’re ready to take things on.”
Like a horror queen in her prime, Paulson is well-versed in shooting such scenes on repeat. In a single day of filming AHS:13, she played five recurring characters, four of whom ultimately plunged headfirst into a molten lava pit. Needless to say, she won’t be playing a tradwife anytime soon. “I feel like I’m made for the extremes,” she says, then catches herself. “Oh God, that’s going to become the headline, isn’t it?”

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In taking big swings, Paulson has stealthily become one of her generation’s most decorated actors. A triple threat who bridges theater, film, and television, she won a Leading Actress Tony in 2024 for playing a self-appointed matriarch of a dysfunctional family in&nbsp;Appropriate. In 2017, she became the first actor to sweep an entire season of five Best Actress awards, including a Golden Globe and an Emmy, for her portrayal of prosecutor Marcia Clark in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. Last year she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. By her side were Murphy, best pal Amanda Peet, and longtime partner Holland Taylor.
While she feels “so much gratitude for the opportunity to do anything at all,” Paulson finds the ever-present prospect of online criticism draining. “Lately, the more connected I am to the work, the more it means to me, the scarier it is to put it out there,” she says. “I feel very vulnerable basically giving birth to something and letting it live out in the world, unprotected. And I say that as a person who’s never given actual birth.”

Lately, the more connected I am to the work, the more it means to me, the scarier it is to put it out there.

Paulson understands that promotion is part of the tacit agreement in being an actor and admits that she, too, has opinions for days. But she is learning to temper how she expresses them. “Back in the day, people used to write things [in print], and then it would be fish wrap the next day. Now everything is just a click away. Things don’t have their natural living, breathing, and then dying moment. It feels perpetually alive, which feels unnatural.” Paulson is realistic that art is meant to be judged. “People can love it, hate it, want it, need it, discard it,” she says. “It’s really none of my business. But I’m not good at doing the bullshit interview thing of being like, It’s great! if that’s not how I feel.”

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She attributes some of this internal reflection to her astrological makeup. “As a Sagittarian, I’m prone to existential conversations about my own psychology,” she says. Star signs and taromancy come up often during the conversation—she’s a fan of astrologer Chris Corsini, and when she’s considering whether to take on a role, her sister often offers to pull tarot cards. Paulson also notes that she is a hardcore Virgo rising. “I’m incredibly controlling,” she says, aware of the contradiction. “I’m not a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of gal at all.”
Murphy has stated in the past that Paulson’s tenacity for character study is part of what drew him to her. The pair has collaborated at least 15 times over the past two decades, starting with 2004’s Nip/Tuck. She compares working with Murphy to discovering a wacky aunt’s attic full of costumes and being asked to play pretend: “It’s like, You want to pay me to dance around in my own imagination about what it would be like to be this supremely powerful witch? From an artistic standpoint, that is where you get to have the most fun, because there’s something limitless about it.”

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Off set, Paulson says her friendship with Murphy endures because they work at it. “It’s a relationship we’ve fought to keep healthy and alive,” she says, adding that about five years ago they experienced a frisson. (Her “nemesis,” the Internet, points to a fallout over creative differences around the time of American Horror Story: Roanoke.) “We have acknowledged that we never want to have a difficult time again, and the only way to do that is to be as open and honest with each other as possible,” she says. “Since then, everything has been so wonderful, and Idon’t know what the alchemy of it is; maybe it’s because he’s a triple Scorpio.”

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When she appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September, the host played a bit where Paulson was snookered into ranking her best friends—of which there appear to be many. (Peet, whom she met on the set of Jack &amp; Jill in 1999, was first. Pedro Pascal was lovingly given the shaft.) Paulson was also close with the late, great Diane Keaton, even tattooing her initials on her arm. When Keaton’s Brentwood house sold last August, Paulson and a group of pals gathered there for one last meal, ordering all of Keaton’s favorite foods and communing in a final goodbye. On Paulson’s Instagram, younger talents get plenty of love, too: Ella Beatty, Emma Roberts, and model Kai Schreiber, about whom Paulson posted after she opened the Thom Browne show during New York Fashion Week.
Schreiber’s mom, Naomi Watts, became close with Paulson after they filmed the extremely camp legal melodrama All’s Fair—the second season of which premieres on Hulu this month—and the indie film Closing Night, written and directed by Cody Fern. In the latter, which Paulson was promoting in Toronto when she momentarily lost her purse/mind, the two play estranged sisters reunited after Paulson’s character receives a dire diagnosis. The scripts couldn’t be more different; think Dynasty versus Terms of Endearment. But from these dramatically opposed sets, yet another friendship was forged. “It was one of my most enjoyable and fulfilling acting experiences in a very long time,” Watts says of filming Closing Night with Paulson.“ Sarah’s pretty extraordinary in the way she’s got the capacity to have so many great friends in her life. I’d say her mind and heart are gargantuan and so unbelievably open.”

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Her openness extends to the red carpet, where she possesses a Cindy Sherman–like ability to switch up her looks. A gray, voluminous Matières Fécales gown for the Met, worn with opera gloves and a dollar-bill eye mask. An off-the-shoulder cream-colored bridal dress by Danielle Frankel at TIFF; a black Kallmeyer jacket and full ball skirt to accompany Taylor to the premiere of Brothers. Fashion is another area in which Paulson feels particularly exposed to online commentary, but at least she’s not facing it alone. In her corner is an unflappable heavyweight: her longtime stylist, Karla Welch. The two have worked together for over a decade and have developed a sisterly shorthand. “She texted me the other day about the American Horror Story premiere and was like, It’s this designer, and it’s everything we love,” says Paulson. “And I knew what she meant—that there was going to be a velvet element, or a shoulder element. There might be a ruffle or a lace or a glove, or who knows what. Some sort of embellishment that makes it above and beyond.” For the record, it was a black Valentino couture dress with a rounded scoop neckline featuring layers of tulle ruffles.

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The actress admits she has been testing the style waters since she was a kid. Born in Tampa, Paulson spent her formative high school years in New York. During her first year at Brooklyn’s private Berkeley Carroll School, she permed her hair and dyed it black to look like a schoolmate. That need to transform has stayed with her. “Up until recently, it was always some version of being inspired by someone else that I perceived to be kind of magical and cool.” She acknowledges that it helps to have a trusted crew when the fashion and beauty whims hit: Welch introduces her to a variety of looks, and LA–based colorist Matt Rez manages her mane. “I get bored,” says Paulson.
“Being a chameleon is an incredible asset as an actor, but on a human level, sometimes I wonder,&nbsp;What are you after that you’re always changing? Like, is that discomfort with self, or am I a person who likes looking at myself from different angles?” Here she once again invokes her Sagittarian need to look inward. “One could also call it narcissism or navel-gazing,” she jokes. “And that would be appropriate.”

In January, Paulson will return to Broadway to start rehearsals for&nbsp;Small Mouth Sounds, written by Tony-winning playwright Bess Wohl of Liberation fame. Three-time Tony Award–winning director Joe Mantello will helm the production, which has attracted an equally impressive cast—Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd, Martin Freeman, Greta Lee, and IsaacPowell. The plot follows a group of city folks seeking peace at a silent spiritual retreat in the woods. With sparse dialogue, the actors will have to connect through emotion and gesture. When she talks about it, Paulson becomes her most animated self yet, brimming with almost girlish excitement. The play seems like a perfect fit for an actor trying to escape the echo chamber.
“We’re all so used to working with language,” Paulson says. After a quick pause, she adds: “Do you know how loud silence is?”

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SET DESIGN: Peter Gueracague
PRODUCED BY: Alexey Galetskiy, Ivan Shentalinskiy, and Justin Barahona AGPNYC
PHOTO ASSISTANTS: Hunter Pao and Mekael Dawson
SET DESIGN ASSISTANT: Brendan Barlow
STYLING ASSISTANT: Madysen Walker

Sarah Paulson on the Art of Self-Reflection

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