Sarah Paulson: ‘If I’m terrified, I feel compelled to do it’
i got a report yesterday saying it was up by…” Sarah Paulson pauses, weighing up whether she wants to reveal the extent of her daily screen time. Then she takes the plunge. “It was nine hours and 52 minutes,” she says, mock-abashed. In a day? She nods. “In a day, yes. Quite terrible. Doesn’t it break down how much of it was work? There was work on there. So I was doing some of that. But… it’s embarrassing.”
We are at the start of another long screen day for Sarah, who is speaking from her kitchen at home in Los Angeles. Her new dog, Winifred, is curled up just out of shot. “Winnie! Would you like to come and say hi?” she coos, in a squeaky voice. “I’m this person! Who does this voice when I talk to my dog!”
Winnie is her first dog in nine and a half years; Sarah has the initials of her old dogs, Alice and Millie, tattooed on the inside of her wrist. “She’s very demanding and she has a lot of personality. She’s recently taken to humping me. She’s my child! Why is she doing this, this 11 month old, precious little thing? I can’t tell you how upsetting it is. She’s not even 8lb [3.6kg]. Her arms clamp around me and I’m like, ‘Oh, stop it!”’
Sarah is a grafting sort, a suburban mother who shifts stolen goods in , or her nine seasons to date of . But world events have meant that she’s recently been much less busy. “Usually, I’m at work and I don’t look at my phone for hours because I can’t,” she says. “But I’m just not as busy. And I don’t seem to have the ability to read right now. My ability to focus is wildly altered in this time.”
