The next Truman Capote: “The White Lotus” star Tom Hollander on channeling the writer in “Feud” season 2

The actor explains how he had "a Studio 54 Truman" in mind for the role.

Tom Hollander didn’t immediately think there were any parallels between his characters on The White Lotus and Feud, but he can kind of see them now. Kind of.

On the HBO Emmy darling, the stage-trained British actor played Quentin, a gay man yachting around Italy who becomes fixated on a woman of high society. Even though that sounds like something straight from the “Explain TV Shows Badly” Twitter trend, it does very loosely resemble Hollander’s Truman Capote in Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans, set in the lavish world of a now-vintage-era New York City when the celebrated author of In Cold Blood was squabbling with his elite friend group of rich socialites.

“I hadn’t thought that, but I suppose you’re absolutely right,” Hollander tells EW while pondering the comparison from a Zoom screen on his bed across the pond. “I thought about how different they were. Truman Capote's an icon, so I felt a burden of, this is a true story, it's history, and he's an extraordinary man who was so individual that various different actors get to play him for all eternity. Quentin is an overprivileged socialite, whereas Truman Capote was a deeply, deeply tragic, flawed, brilliant man. But I suppose both métiers are high society, aren’t they?”

Following in the footsteps of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won an Oscar for playing the title role in 2005’s Capote, and Toby Jones, who starred as the eccentric Breakfast at Tiffany’s author in 2006’s Infamous, Hollander now portrays Capote during one of the most tumultuous times of his life.

Struck with a serious case of writer’s block and a splash of alcoholism, the writer publishes an excerpt from what he thinks will be his magnum opus, Answered Prayers, in the pages of Esquire magazine in 1975. The passage sparks an instant scandal. The characters and situations are so thinly veiled that all of high society can plainly see he’s airing the dirty laundry of some of his closest friends, whom he often refers to as “Swans,” such as Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), and C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny).

Unlike Quentin, Capote doesn’t try to murder any of these women, apart from some light character assassination, though Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) famously kills herself upon the excerpt’s publication. (It might have something to do with the fact that Capote accuses her of intentionally murdering her husband.) The retaliation is swift: The ladies who lunch close ranks and do everything they can to expel Capote from society. These events were notably chronicled in Laurence Leamur’s 2021 book Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, on which Feud season 2 is largely based.

“I kept looking at it as a multifaceted examination of what it is to squander your life inadvertently, accidentally, deliberately, self-destructively, on so many different levels,” says playwright Jon Robin Baitz, who serves as writer and showrunner on Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. “I found it to be a cautionary tale and an accurate representation of what can happen when you're not listening to yourself. Your life becomes about your name on the invitation to the gala, your collections, your standing in a society where you are within a system. The show very much is, for me, about the profound loneliness of beauty and fame.”

The biggest blow is the falling out between Capote and Babe, whom the writer holds in the highest esteem. "They're two broken people. They're both in similar kinds of pain," Baitz says of their dynamics. "They're both very invested in survival in society, while being seen. They're both profoundly lonely people. They're both intelligent and performative. I think that they're linked in an understanding that their lives, much like the royal family, require a kind of ceremony about them, require a kind of artfulness at all times."

Hollander is clearly having a blast on screen as he channels Capote’s unique high-pitched voice and all-around flamboyance, while slinging precisely crafted barbs and sipping martinis on fabulous sets that emulate New York City decadence. Though the actor was highly aware of Hoffman’s performance, which still looms large over the character, this felt like a different shade of Capote.

“I knew that he was a drunk. I had a Studio 54 Truman in my mind,” he says. “I knew those early pictures of him, and I read [1948’s] Other Voices, Other Rooms when I was a teenager. I had a sense of him as a writer and as a Southern man. The world of the Swans I didn't really know about.”

Hollander explains how Baitz, executive producer Ryan Murphy, and director Gus Van Sant “distilled this whole period,” saying, “They all thought of Truman as not only a writer, but, in a way, as a sort of martyr. Truman was profoundly courageous, a tough little fighter who lived at a time when it was way harder to be gay than it is now. He was out there and he was properly flamboyant, and there was a danger to the way that he was living. He needed these ladies. He obviously needed them a lot. And that's why he couldn't live without them.”

As for the Swans, their feelings on the matter are more: These gays, they’re trying to murder me...in the press.

Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans will premiere the first two episodes on FX on Jan. 31 at 10 p.m. ET/PT, followed by a streaming release on Hulu the next day.

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