Sarah Paulson will once again be portraying a real-life person for Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology “American Crime Story,” but her transformation into former White House employee Linda Tripp in the upcoming third season, “Impeachment,” will entail much more work than the one she did to portray prosecutor Marcia Clark in Season 1, “The People Vs. O.J.” At least in the physical sense.
“This is going to require a lot of things,” Paulson said during Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!.” “I’ll be wearing a lot of prosthetics and body transformational accoutrements, if that’s a word I can use.”
Tripp was a key figure in the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, a story that will be the focus of “Crime Story” Season 3. “Impeachment: American Crime Story” was originally scheduled to premiere this fall on FX but delayed back in January due to Murphy’s congested schedule. The season was just two weeks away from going into production when the pandemic hit. Not long after that, Tripp passed away.
“And I don’t know if I ever would have met Linda, or if Linda would have even been open to doing anything like that. But I got as many text messages when she passed away as if I had died or if she was my best friend,” Paulson told Jimmy Kimmel. “People were like, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about Linda’ and I was like, ‘I’m really sorry to hear about it too, but I didn’t know her.’ And it was weird, because I had been spending so much time reading all these books and working with a dialect coach, so I was immersed in this. It was a very wild thing and it really did make me sad.”
No new production start or premiere date has been set for “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” which also stars Clive Owen as Bill Clinton, Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinksy, Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones, Billy Eichner as Matt Drudge and Betty Gilpin as Ann Coulter.
Watch Paulson’s interview with Kimmel above.