You probably know Sarah Paulson best from her many different roles on American Horror Story .
Or, her breathtaking performance as Marcia Clark on The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story .
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The actress has also made front-page news for her personal life, as she is currently dating Holland Taylor, the Legally Blonde actress who is 31 years her senior.
1. She was raised by a single mother.
When the actress was just five, her mother left her father and moved Sarah and her younger sister to New York.
Times were tough, as her mother, an aspiring writer, didn’t have a lot of money. They lived in a small apartment in Queens with a mattress on the floor.
Her mother was raised by very religious parents, but grew up to be a little different.
“She moved from where she grew up to New York with two young children and just lived an entirely other life,” she told The Guardian.
2. She is currently dating Holland Taylor.
Their romance began in the unlikeliest of places: on Twitter.
While on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen , Sarah said that Holland slid into her DMs.
Some people have taken issue with the couple’s significant age gap.
That’s because Paulson is 31 years younger than Holland.
But the couple, who have been dating since 2015, don’t let that stop them.
“People look at me and Holland and say, ‘Mommy issues,’ but I parent her as much as she parents me, so that’s not it,” she told The Sunday Times .
3. She misses auditioning.
As a big-time actress, her days of auditioning for most roles are over.
But Sarah told The Guardian that she misses feeling like she earned the part. The last thing she auditioned for was The Goldfinch , aka the movie that bombed.
4. She has a huge fear of flying.
This certainly makes her career difficult since actresses jet-set all around the world.
To relieve some of her anxiety, she has to talk with the pilot before any flight takes off.
“I will not fly unless they let me into the cockpit to have a little word with them before we go,” the actress said during an episode of *The Late Night with Seth Meyers*.
She said that some pilots have fun with this by joking that it’s their first day or whispering her name throughout the flight.
“I just thought . . . Focus on giving our coordinates!” she said.
5. She doesn’t watch anything she is in anymore.
This all started after she played Marcia Clark on The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story .
She told Vanity Fair that the positive reactions to her performance were making her nervous (she ended up winning the Golden Globe for her role).
“It was the first time in my career where I really felt such an onslaught of complimentary, effusive reactions to the show itself and to my work on it,” she said.
“That I started to get very nervous about my typical way of watching something and ripping it to shreds when it’s my own work. I felt too many feelings about playing her.”
6. Her first professional acting role was on Broadway.
This was as an understudy for Amy Ryan in Wendy Wasserstein’s, The Sisters Rosensweig .
After this, she landed a Law and Order episode and then got onto a show called American Gothic .
7. She was warned by her friends not to go public with her relationship with Holland.
“Early on, when people found out I was with Holland, someone said: ‘I think you have to be careful, I’m afraid it’s going to affect your career negatively,'” she said in an interview with The Edit .
Thankfully, that never happened.
8. She tried to copy Julia Roberts’ career.
“There was a time when I believed if I was going to be successful, it was going to look like a particular thing. And that particular thing was Julia Roberts,” she told GQ .
“I was young and wanted to be an actress, and success meant being an enormous mega-movie star. It had to look like the trajectory of the actors around me.”
Thankfully, she decided to just be herself.
“I was so busy wanting to be Julia Roberts that it never occurred to me that my career could be something else.”
9. She has a “creative marriage” with TV producer Ryan Murphy.
The pair became close after working on American Horror Story for so long.
When he was thinking of actresses for Ratched on Netflix, he called her.
10. She is on the upcoming season of *American Horror Story*.
With the show tackling Bill Clinton’s impeachment, she is tackling the role of Linda Tripp.
She is the Pentagon employee who secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky confessing her sexual relationship with the then-president.
“I had to think, was that going to be interesting for me? Not to mention, he asked me to executive produce the thing, and that was something I had never done,” she told *The Guardian*.
In the end, the fact that it terrified her caused her to say yes.
“I think if I feel terrified to do it, I almost feel compelled, that I don’t have a choice.”
11. Sarah’s excited to really sink her teeth into the role.
“For me, playing her is not an opportunity to revise history, it’s just a chance for me to share the underbelly of something that, if we do it right, will at the very least make it possible for you to go, ‘I understand now, what she was doing.’”
12. She wasn’t popular in high school.
Instead of going to parties and being a wild child, the actress was focused on her career by being a theater geek .
This paid off in the end, as she booked her first acting job a few months after graduating.
13. She is okay with playing nasty characters.
She did so on 12 Years a Slave by playing Mary Epps, a racist and mean plantation owner.
She told GQ that she was okay with playing “a really hideous woman in an unapologetic way.”
She even had friends who refused to play the part since she was so despicable.
But what Sarah finds unforgivable is passing up difficult characters.
“That was totally perplexing to me in a way that is sort of unforgivable.”
14. When she was young, watching television was considered negative, but she is happy to see that has changed with time.
It offers an escape to people, and what she loves best is that it connects everyone to the stories, and to each other.
15. For a long time she preferred apartments over houses.
She felt that once she bought a house, she was officially an adult, and preferred the notion that she was still in her young years by going from apartment to apartment.
16. She told The Playlist that anyone who works on TV HAS to be a good actor (and they are often disregarded as not as great as movie actors).
“Think about it for a second, just think about it. I’ve said this before, but anybody who gives a good performance on television, they have to be a good actor because you don’t have time,” she said.
“For me, I don’t have the kind of brain. You leave me alone for too much time to think about something, I will paint myself right into a corner. If I don’t have time to think about it, it’s going on gut instinct.”
“I think sometimes it serves you better than when you involve your brain.”
17. She doesn’t like being offered parts.
“I like to sing for my supper,” she told InStyle . “I like to go into an audition room, particularly when they think I’m not right for a part, and really fight for it. There’s something so exciting and challenging about proving to yourself that you can pull it off.”
“I have a terrible fear that I’ll open my mouth and they’re going to go, ‘Oh … that’s not what we thought we were getting.’”
“I’ve been trying to tell myself, ‘What would happen, Sarah, if you decided to believe that you are here because they want you to be here, not because you still have something to prove?’ It’s a very hard thing for me to get my brain around.”
18. She worked at a restaurant for one day.
When she realized she couldn’t spell the word “Parmesan” and had to call her mother to help her, she realized that the world of restaurants and customer service was not for her after all.
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