Emmy spotlight: Naomi Watts (‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’) dazzles as heartbreakingly ‘brittle’ Babe Paley

David Buchanan
·4 min read
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“Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” pits the incendiary author Truman Capote against a “gaggle” of New York socialites, but there is one “swan” that is truly at the heart of the roost, namely, Babe Paley, played by Naomi Watts. Since Babe is the closest of all the women to the writer, his betrayal of the group in 1975 in his scathing “Esquire” excerpt from his unfinished novel “Answered Prayers” hits her the hardest, and the other swans rally to her defense to ice the “In Cold Blood” scribe out of the upper echelons of society.

What makes the relationship between Babe and Truman so compelling—in addition to the performances of Watts and Tom Hollander—is how much we see of their friendship blossoming. The entire opening sequence of the season shows Capote comforting and strategizing with Babe over how to handle the latest and most disgraceful of her husband Bill’s (Treat Williams) infidelities. The love that Watts imbues in Babe in those opening moments, as well as in the scenes in which Babe and Truman first meet in 1955, is matched in intensity with the anger she feels when Capote uses her husband’s affairs as cannon fodder for his languishing career. For her performance, Watts has more than earned the first Emmy nomination of her career.

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SEE Emmy spotlight: Demi Moore as the ‘haunted’ Ann Woodward in ‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’

According to our early 2024 Emmy odds, Watts will crack the official lineup for Movie/Limited Actress, ranking in sixth place. It certainly helps that the two-time Oscar-nominated performer—for films “21 Grams” and “The Impossible”—will likely compete in the leading category, whereas all the other Swans, including Diane Lane, Chloe Sevigny, Calista Flockhart, Demi Moore and others, are expected to go supporting. That placement will absolutely be warranted, too, given how much of the story of the feud between Capote and his former friends centers on Babe.

Critics have been particularly complimentary to Watts’ turn in the latest installment of the FX limited series. Judy Berman (Time) calls the actress “enchantingly brittle” and Benjamin Lee (Guardian), on a similar wavelength, says Watts is “nailing brittle stateliness.” Lili Loofbourow (Washington Post) declares that the actress “more than lives up to… Babe’s perfection.”

SEE Compare ‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’ cast to their real-life counterparts

Indeed, part of what makes Watt’s portrayal of Babe so compelling is how she enables us to see the effort behind her character’s perfection, especially as Babe grapples with a terminal cancer diagnosis. The fourth episode of the season, “It’s Impossible,” opens with Babe getting herself perfectly coiffed to leave the house, only to strip all of her glamorous armor off for another round of imaging at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The montage ends with a truly haunting shot of Watts’ face as we see, for one of the only times in the series’ run thus far, that her carefully cultivated exterior is a facade masking her terror.

As Babe’s steely attitude toward Capote softens because she knows she has very limited time left, Watts truly shines in a terrific scene when Babe accidentally bumps into her estranged best friend Truman while window shopping. Their conversation is nothing much more than casual, barely delving into the rift between them, but Watts imbues the exchange with as much emotion as a final farewell, perhaps intuiting that she will never see her once closest confident again. As Babe scurries off, lest she keep her loving but philandering husband waiting, the audience watch her wave goodbye, a haunting visual from a dying character that Emmy nominators will likely not soon forget.

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