Sarah Paulson takes Broadway for a shocking spin in ‘Appropriate’

When Sarah Paulson makes an entrance, in character, a spell is cast. The energy around her crackles. What’s she going to say or do? She is a master of the calm seethe and the faux-polite undercut, the placid smile masking a tangle of emotions.

To paraphrase Chekhov’s gun principle, if you see a Sarah Paulson in the first act, she’s going to go off by the third.

She’s the best at finding the chewy, vulnerable center of even the most overtly villainous, as in her turn as a nascent sadist in the 2020 Ryan Murphy series “Ratched.” And she’s currently excavating the complicated, curdled psyche of the lead character in “Appropriate,” the critically adored Broadway play that just had its run extended to June.

But when Paulson joins me in a loungey nook upstairs at the Hayes Theater, her first order of business is making things more comfortable.

“So awful!” she says, gesturing at the fluorescent lights. “I tell them, ‘Guys, you can’t do this to people!’” After she’s dimmed the white-hot glare and turned on a more civilized lamp, she settles into a chair, The Row cream sweater and wide black pants nestling around her. Adidas Sambas, plus a Foundrae necklace and Cartier bracelet, complete the classic look.

Warm, funny and attuned to little details, Paulson couldn’t be more different from her character, Antoinette “Toni” Lafayette. It’s a return to her stage origins — Paulson got her start understudying Amy Ryan in the 1993 Broadway production of “The Sisters Rosensweig.” She has long been fabulous in the public eye; she’s unapologetically queer, and usually clad in something epic.

For almost a decade, she’s been partners with the equally formidable actress Holland Taylor (although they have no plans to work together). Their age difference — Taylor’s 32 years older — has generated its share of public commentary, about which Paulson once summed up her feelings to the writer Roxane Gay: “Anybody says anything about any person I love in a way that is disrespectful or cruel and I want to cut a bitch.”

She dishes out similarly spiky, if much less empathetic, language in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ devastating, acidly funny drama, which made its debut off-Broadway a decade ago (and is moving to the Belasco Theatre this month). A fractious group of adult siblings convene at the crumbling former plantation of their late father, a borderline hoarder whose belongings include a scrapbook of what appear to be photos of lynching victims.

Toni, the eldest and their father’s primary caretaker, strenuously resists the notion that a relative could be a violent racist. And she exhibits a similar lack of insight into her own flaws, leaning into the narrative that she’s been done wrong by her two younger brothers, one a financially successful father of two (Corey Stoll, who was Paulson’s classmate at NYC’s LaGuardia High School), the other a recovering addict and ex-con (Michael Esper).

It’s a nuclear-strength dose of dysfunction, but Paulson says almost everyone sees an unsettling glimmer of familiarity in one character or another.

“The common refrain I hear is, ‘Oh my god, the family dynamics,’ or ‘I’m an older sister, and thank you for representing that so unapologetically.’ Everybody’s got a family, and everybody’s got some version of someone being represented up there.”

“Appropriate” is the hot ticket of the season. Bradley Cooper, Angelina Jolie, Demi Moore, Rose Byrne, Courteney Cox, Ariana DeBose and Pedro Pascal have all shown up in recent weeks.

Pascal is a longtime fan of Paulson’s. “He’s one of my oldest friends,” she says. “I’ve known him since I was 18. Some of my high school friends went to NYU with him, and we met and sort of stayed in each other’s lives. He’s an extremely talented actor. And he just belongs to the world now!” (Check out the “Fancam Assembly” sketch from Pascal’s stint hosting “Saturday Night Live” last year, and catch Paulson making a very funny cameo.)

In her television and film roles, Paulson has an unparalleled knack for embodying public figures.

“I just love playing real people more than almost anything,” she says. “I love the concreteness of it.”

Her 2016 role as prosecutor Marcia Clark in Murphy’s “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” won her an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and was widely credited with bringing about a cultural reconsideration of Clark. Murphy, of course, is a central figure in Paulson’s fame trajectory: Along with the Clark role, she’s appeared in nine seasons of his “American Horror Story,” and played Linda Tripp in “Impeachment: American Crime Story” and Geraldine Page in the first season of “Feud.”

She’s now got a trio of upcoming real-person roles, all up in the air timing-wise thanks to last year’s strike. Two years ago, she appeared on the hit self-help podcast “We Can Do Hard Things” to announce she’ll play the show’s co-host Glennon Doyle in an adaptation of Doyle’s best-selling book “Untamed.” She’s also set to play Gwen Shamblin Lara, the late big-haired weight loss cult leader depicted in the HBO Max docuseries “The Way Down.” And in “I Am Sibyl,” she’ll re-team with “Appropriate” co-star Elle Fanning in a biopic about the famed multiple-personality case.    

Paulson is a keenly shrewd observer of human nature. It’s a skill that fuels “Appropriate,” but also presents its own set of challenges. Audiences whose public etiquette has atrophied during the pandemic years can, and do, drive her a little nuts.

“I think they think there’s, like, a glass partition as if it’s a television, and we can’t see you or we’re not aware of you,” Paulson muses. “Did you hear the snorer last night?”

I did not, and cannot imagine at what point in the play’s unrelenting tension anyone could fall asleep. Paulson adds there’s a new phenomenon in which people keep their phones balanced on their laps — many of which inevitably clatter to the ground.

“And the bane of my existence,” she says, “is the ice in plastic cups. They’re shaking them to make sure they get the last drop of merlot or whatever. All these things affect us, and we feel it, and I don’t think people are aware of that.” In moments offstage, she’ll huddle with Esper and rant about the distraction du jour.

“We’re doing these things that require an emotional pillage of our deepest, darkest internal wounds and secret things! It’s hard to do on a good day,” she says. “I’ve never had the vocal communication with the audience that I’ve wanted to have, because I’m not Patti LuPone, but I have come onstage and been so angry,” she says. (LuPone is famous on Broadway for stopping the show to call out bad behavior.)

To get in the “Appropriate” zone, Paulson has a warmup playlist. Like so many of us, she’s gone full Swiftie. “Since I saw [Taylor Swift’s] concert, I’ve just become an absolute psycho,” Paulson says. “Because the canon is so large! I’m constantly like, wait, what is this song? Then I get obsessed with it, and I wake up singing it, and go to sleep singing it, and when I wake up to pee in the middle of the night, it’s in my head. I’m like, what is going on?”

One thing Swift and Paulson have in common — besides their passionate fan bases — is an affinity for statement outfits. “I wore a Prada dress when I won the Emmy, and that will, forever and always, be like my wedding day. The excitement my stylist, Karla Welch, had in her voice when she said, ‘I think I found your dress!’ — she was practically in tears,” says Paulson.

The ceremony of wearing carefully curated outfits is, for her, always intertwined with the emotions of the event. “There’s a kind of beautiful thing about remembering,” she says. “I had this beautiful Armani dress that Joan Rivers just blasted. I felt I had arrived because she was talking about me! A piece of the dress ripped that night, and my friend got it and put it in a Lucite box, and I have it on a shelf in my closet. These things just become inexorably linked to imprints of life moments.”

When she’s at home, Paulson prefers to be covered in dogs rather than jewels. “There’s nothing I like more than coming home from work and all three dogs run and jump on top of me and just kiss me all over. They have varying degrees of horrifying breath, and I don’t care. I’ve got tongues in my eyeballs and my nose and my ears, and I’m like, this is the best!”

But she’s also aiming to get out more with her co-workers. “Last night,” Paulson tells me, “the cast went out for drinks for the first time! It’s a hard play to do, and I think we’d just gotten into doing the show and going home to recuperate. But we did that last night, and it was really fun. So maybe in the next few days, we’re going to be doing that more.”

As “Appropriate” heads toward its next iteration, Paulson’s ever more grateful she stayed the course with the long-gestating production.

“I’ve been attached to this play since 2021. And I’ve never let it go. There were things that have come and gone that I’ve said no to. And I didn’t let the play go. I’m so glad that I didn’t, because it ended up being more successful than I could ever have dreamt.”

Photographer: Victoria Will; Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Photo Editor: Jessica Hober; Talent Booker: Patty Adams Martinez; Hair: Anthony Campbell at A-Frame Agency using Rōz; Makeup: Romy Soleimani at The Wall Group; Manicure: Nori at See Management using Chanel Le Vernis; Prop Stylist: Gregory Andrew Powell; Fashion Assistant: Alex Bullock, On-set Assistant: Meghan Powers