Sarah Paulson Talks Executive Producing Her First Film ‘Hold Your Breath’ & The Mental “Exhaustion” Of Being A Scream Queen: The Deadline Q&A
With another spooky season upon us, it’s Sarah Paulson‘s time to shine in the genre she loves.
After executive producing her first film Hold Your Breath, which landed today on Hulu, the Golden Globe winner opened up about being “in charge” on set and how “exhaustion” helped her tap into her latest role in the psychological thriller.
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“I almost felt like I was too busy trying to hold the complete story in my head to allow myself to descend too deeply inside of it,” Paulson tells Deadline. “And I feel like sometimes it’s just an occupational hazard, that reality. I wish I had a real answer of how I shake it because sometimes I don’t think that I do. I think it all just gets into the sort of nooks and crannies of my being and makes a house there, so I’m not always the best at alleviating some of that.”
Written by Karrie Crouse and marking her and husband Will Joines‘ feature directorial debut, Hold Your Breath takes place amid the horrific dust storms of 1930s Oklahoma. Paulson stars as Margaret Bellum, a woman convinced that a sinister presence is threatening her family.
Produced by Alix Madigan and Lucas Joaquin, the film also stars Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Annaleigh Ashford, as well as Amiah Miller and Alona Jane Robbins as Margaret’s daughters.
Filled with ever-relevant themes like the climate crisis and the country’s struggle between mental health and religion, Hold Your Breath offered a perspective that appealed to Paulson. But at its core, she was most compelled by the film’s mother-daughter dynamic.
DEADLINE: Tell me how you became attached to Hold Your Breath.
SARAH PAULSON: I got a phone call saying, ‘Hey, do you read this script? And these filmmakers, it would be their first film, but they’ve done some really interesting things in the past.’ And the writer was a writer on Westworld and they’re a husband-and-wife team, and I just read the script and I just thought the script was really special and very unique and had a real point of view. And it was obviously a genre I’ve worked in before, a genre I love working in, and yet there was something about it, given the geographical circumstances of the film, but also the time period that were really interesting to me. So, I just really jumped at the chance to do it.
DEADLINE: You’ve been an executive producer on a few shows at this point. Was this your first movie to EP? What was that experience like for you?
PAULSON: You know, let’s just say that it suits me because I’m a very controlling person. I like to be in charge. I like to have a seat at any table and it’s nice when I sort of normally just find a way to shove myself somewhere between two people at a table, even if I haven’t been invited. But it’s very nice when I’m allowed to be there, because I think it’s a very different thing having been on both sides of it, of having the opportunity to do that and not doing it because it’s somehow, I bet it’s sort of like what it feels like the difference between being engaged and getting married. It’s like you really feel like you’re participating in a way that feels empowering because a lot of times as actors, at the end of the day, you come in, you give your performance, you do your work and the rest is sort of left up to the director and the editors and marketing people. And when you have the title of being an executive producer, I think you end up having more opportunity to be part of a larger conversation about the movie as a whole and about the storytelling as a whole that feels sort of integral to me from an acting standpoint to have that. You’re putting so much of what’s inside of you outside and then you’re kind of leaving it up to everyone else to determine how to make best use of that. So it feels like a very natural step to me. I wish every actor was able to have an opportunity to do that or to participate in that way because I think it really does help you feel like the piece belongs to you more. And it’s obviously a really community effort, any filmmaking undertaking, whether it’s television or film always is, but it’s really nice to feel sort of officially a part of something, even if directors are very generous and want your opinion and all of that. I’ve been lucky in that regard too, and people always seem to be very, very happy to have meaningful conversations about things. But it’s really nice when it’s sort of legitimized in a way.
DEADLINE: You touched on this being a genre that you love, but you’ve also specifically done a few of these maternal thriller roles. What is it about them that appeals to you?
PAULSON: Well, I wonder if it’s partly due to… like maybe I’m exorcising some secret wish of mine. You know, I’m not a mother, in terms of, I did not have any biological children. I have three dogs that might as well be my children and might as well have been born of my being but are actually not because that would be super weird but a girl can dream. But I wonder if there’s just some kind of thing in me, certainly in this genre but in any genre really where … playing anything with extremely high stakes is where I think you can have the most fun from an acting standpoint and also be the most truthful because I think any time you’re filming anything, or anything has been determined worthy of making, you’re usually dealing with the character’s most important day, or the most significant time in their life is usually what’s being depicted. You don’t often film someone in the most ordinary of days often, when it comes to storytelling. So, I sort of feel like there is nothing more significant in life than one’s relationship to one’s mother. And so, even though I do not have children of my own, I do have a mother and there’s just something about it that seems to me to be a compelling space to draw from and draw upon. I don’t know, you’d have to ask my shrink probably. What I’m trying to get at is that it’s a high stakes thing to be a parent, every time a child leaves the house to go to school, every time a child is anywhere outside of your sight. You are sort of rolling the dice as it were, to hope that everything about their day and their life experience will be good and safe. And so to be in a circumstance, I always just feel like it’s extraordinarily fertile ground.
DEADLINE: Tell me about the actresses who played your daughters.
PAULSON: Well, they were extraordinary. Again, because I was EP-ing, I was able to watch everybody’s audition tapes and it just was so clear to me from the moment that both of them appeared on these little videos I was watching, there could be no one playing the parts but them. And I’ve had this experience a couple of times too where, I wasn’t playing their mothers but with Lizzie Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene, with Lupita [Nyong’o] in 12 Years a Slave, like having these experiences of working with people their first time out of the gate, and having that front-row seat for the beginning of someone’s career and the first time they were on a set. And that certainly wasn’t the case with Amiah in terms of never having worked before, but this was a big jump forward for her in terms of responsibility. And it was just a really kind of a special thing to witness. And I just think it’s always really wonderful to work with young people because a lot of times, they don’t have years and years of experience where they have become sort of inured to their own spontaneity or their own ability to listen to their instincts or have all that stuff so drilled out of them, because they spend so much time in a set that they forget what it’s like just to live a sort of regular life. And so, I just really like it because you’re getting people right at the beginning of something.
DEADLINE: I appreciated a lot of the themes, as far as mental health versus religion, and also the climate crisis as well, it’s a lot of still very relevant issues. Did that speak to you as well?
PAULSON: Absolutely. I had, of course, read about the Dust Bowl. I had never watched the Ken Burns documentary about the Dust Bowl prior to deciding to do this movie, but when I knew I was going to do it, I did. And you know, so much of the story of the Dust Bowl, if not all of it is sort of self generated, country generated, government generated. We were over-harvesting and then basically depleted the land of its ability to produce anything. And in that part of the world where there’s not a single mountain or tree or in sight, nothing to impede the dust from becoming what it does and what it becomes in this movie, it was just a wall of dirt, no rain and all these things. There’s something about it, that any time you’re inhabiting a world where you are living inside something very real, meaning not just the sci-fi sort of fantastical horrors or the supernatural horrors, but this idea that this is just about a family living in a part of our country where the world outside their front door was uninhabitable. And, you know, I certainly think that is really terrifying, and it actually happened in our country. It actually was really something to see, these people [in the documentary] talk about what it was like and how viscerally they are still able to recall it and how hideous it was — certainly, post-Covid.
DEADLINE: You’ve done so much horror now and you have such a great signature terrified performance. How do you go to that mental headspace and then how do you take yourself out of that when you’re done with the scene?
PAULSON: You know, I wish I could say I was one of those people who knew how to compartmentalize. I’m not very good at it. So, I’m not a person who can kind of do a particularly harrowing scene or deal with something particularly upsetting and then just sort of go about figuring out what I’m gonna eat for dinner. I’m not very good at that. I need to get better at that because the consequence of course means I end up carrying some of it around longer than I would like to. But I think sometimes, exhaustion can be your friend, and we were shooting the movie far from my home and I just wasn’t doing anything but the movie. So, I think I was able to kind of live as inside of it as I could in a way that was helpful for me in terms of carrying the story around. There’s so much that happens in the movie and because it’s like, ‘Are we in Margaret’s mind sort of what she’s experiencing in her mind or are we in reality and keeping track of those things?’ [That] was something that I had to have like a board where I had a big calendar of events in terms of what was really happening, what hadn’t happened yet, what was happening in Margaret’s sort of waking dream state when she was sleepwalking, all of these events that I had to really keep track of. So I almost felt like I was too busy trying to hold the complete story in my head to to allow myself to descend too deeply inside of it. And I feel like sometimes it’s just an occupational hazard, that reality. I wish I had a real answer of how I shake it because sometimes I don’t think that I do, I think it all just gets into the sort of nooks and crannies of my being and makes a house there. So, I’m not always the best at alleviating some of that. I mean, I could say, ‘Yeah, I take a bath,’ but that would sort of be a lie. I think some part of it is … it is a muscle, it’s like an acting muscle that I have. And for better or for worse, my mother called me Sarah Bernhardt for a reason. I always had a flair for the dramatic and of course, to me at the time, when my mother was calling me that, I was having the biggest experience about something like I needed a certain pair of socks from the Gap … But I always had big reactions to things and big feelings. So, on some level I was born with, you could call it a gift or a curse, which is big feelings all the time. So I have access to them in a way, that maybe your average person doesn’t. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly helps me in my work, that’s for sure.
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