If you’re one of the 44 million people to have taken a peek at the drama, the fashion and the fierceness on display in the All’s Fair trailer, then you most certainly noticed how much screen time Sarah Paulson gets and just how many wild lines she delivers with the sharpest of tongues.
But when she got a look at it, Paulson reveals it made her slightly nervous. “At first, I thought, oh my God, this is exposing too much of Carrington Lane,” the Emmy Award winner explained to The Hollywood Reporter at the show’s Los Angeles premiere. “But then I realized it was just the tiniest tip of the iceberg in terms of what I get to do.”
The Ryan Murphy creation stars Paulson alongside Kim Kardashian, Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts and Teyana Taylor in the story of successful divorce lawyers who split from a high-profile company to launch their own all-female divorce firm. It’s not really a spoiler to say that Paulson’s character, Carrington Lane, is employed at the firm they left behind. However, she reemerges in a case that is central to the fireworks on display throughout the season. And that’s why she earned a memorable nickname from one of her co-stars.
“Teyana Taylor likes to call me a menace,” Paulson said with a smile. “And it’s true. My character is the real menace of the show.” It’s something Paulson has perfected in various Ryan Murphy productions. But even with many seasons of American Horror Story under her belt, All’s Fair presented a new kind of challenge for the veteran star.
“I haven’t been on a procedural show in a very long time, and this show is very much a proceduraly in that every week we have a new case. There’s something about that, at least in this vein, that I’ve never really done, maybe ever. This was a new and exciting world for me to play in but it still has all of the things that you expect from Ryan, which is big drama, juicy sex, comedy, darkness, big high stakes, beautiful sets, beautiful clothes. It holds all of that in the same space.”
Asked to name her favorite scene, Paulson picked a couple.
“There’s a little bit of this in the trailer, actually just a smidge, but I dress up like Kim Kardashian at one point. It was a really fun, extraordinarily special day that we got to spend together because Kim gave us free reign to do whatever we wanted in dressing like her. ‘Go for it,’ she said. That was really, really, really fun. And then every scene that I got to do with Glenn Close led to pinch me moments. It was an iconic moment and I was constantly saying to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m doing this.’”
All’s Fair debuts on Nov. 4.
