American Horror Story Great Again Promo
Why 'American Horror Story' Is a Great Showcase for Veteran Actresses
A damaged nun, an erotic writer, and even a mousy hotel manager make for the best, darkly complex characters.
At the end of each American Horror Story season, it resets. The ensemble characters reach a hopeful future or begin rigor mortis. This is the anthology that has turned Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters into familiar faces, so much so fans have begged for their return after a season with their absence. It earned Lady Gaga a Golden Globe Award. Whether a season's abundance of plot twists worked or were just for shock value, it always gave juicy material for its cast. The show's murky moral compass never settled on just the good and the bad, but comfortably within the ugly.
On this show, any character can turn into a killer. It's so consistent, it's become an in-universe rule, especially for the ghosts. These very bloody gray areas for its veteran actresses are especially important when they often get confined to the awful term: "women of a certain age." This is American Horror Story, where nothing is as it seems. That can only mean the following characters don't have to be shackled to stereotypes. And man, do they have fun with it.
There is a reason Jessica Lange won acting awards for Constance Langdon and Fiona Goode. She makes grand dame selfishness look so enticing, all while smoking a cigarette like the best of femme fatales of the past. Yet of the four seasons she starred in, it's Sister Jude of Season 2's Asylum that is her best performance. This is a nun who runs Briarcliff Manor with an iron fist, while wearing crimson lingerie under her habit. There is no true faith within Sister Jude; she's running from her past. Lange mentions in a 2012 interview the specific criteria she wanted to act when the second season was being created. "I had never played an alcoholic before," she said. "I wanted to play a great drunk scene, and I asked Ryan (Murphy) for that. I wanted to play somebody who was really down and out, and also in that whole area of madness."
Compared to Lange's other roles on this show, Sister Jude has the most fleshed-out arc. By the final episode of Asylum, she's been taken in by an old patient, Kit Walker (Peters), one she used to treat terribly. He forgives her, choosing to give her a new start. She's able to heal from mental deterioration she's suffered from switching as authority-to-patient within Briarcliff. After so many previous close calls, Jude then peacefully dies, unafraid. The purgatory of suffering leading up to this finale involved lobotomies, Nazi fugitives, and possessed nuns. As crucial as the emotional beats to Jude's final moments are, perhaps the best highlight of Asylum came with "The Name Game." The song popped in out of nowhere, breaking up the season's grim tone, if only temporarily. The whole cast got involved, led by Lange. If there was any question before, Lange proved to be down to do pretty much anything.
Oscar winner Kathy Bates joined the cast with Season 3's Coven. As Delphine LaLaurie, Bates plays a violent, racist monster. However dark and delirious the role could have been, there was a heavy dose of sympathy given to LaLaurie. An odd choice, as she was based on a real-life monstrous figure. It might have just been what Bates does best, humanizing her characters, making vulnerability look easy to display. LaLaurie's cries of fear when a house phone rings are both hysterical and pitiful. This is a woman thrust into a whole new century, who has to deal with it with no helping hand. She also doesn't deserve one. A few seasons later, it was her role of Iris in Hotel where Bates got to explore this vulnerability in a whole new way.
As the manager of the Hotel Cortez, Iris is a great example of the AHS blend of the mundane and the extreme. She's an unhappy woman with big framed glasses, with a son who hates her, and who ends up turned into a vampire. Wait, no — in an EW interview back in 2015, Ryan Murphy clarified Hotel didn't have vampires as his blood-suckers had "no cape and fangs." Bates is still turned into something that craves human blood. When Iris is disrespected again and again by a hipster couple (Darren Criss, Jessica Lu), she finally snaps. She stabs them, as many times as the insults they throw her way. "You have no idea what it's like to be gutted!" Iris hollers, speaking metaphorically but doing so physically, spraying blood all over Darren Criss's pretty face. This being the same woman who later ends up making her own memorial video in the case of her death, it's a loving mashup of stock photos of kittens and roses as "I Hope You Dance" by Lee Ann Womack plays. By the end of Hotel, Iris finds a new way to keep on living, by making the Hotel Cortez into a home.
Coven gets brought up again as it really just has so much scene chewing for its older actresses. Frances Conroy's Myrtle Snow is the high-fashioned, powerful witch that remains one of the best parts of that season. She's also a burning red head, in more ways than one. "Balenciaga!" she screams, while being burned at the stake. All that is great stuff, but it was Season 10's Red Tide where she got to explore a darker role. As Moira in Season 1, there was much sadness to the maid stuck as a ghost. Freakshow's Gloria Mott and Cult's Bebe Babbitt were all too easily dispatched to really be a threat. In Red Tide, writer Belle Noir is formidable and erotic. She even knows how to let loose and enjoy late night karaoke in wintry Provincetown. But she didn't start that way. Belle arrived to the Cape as a self-published author, whose husband was disgusted at her sensual prose. She had the potential talent to reap so many more rewards and needed the little black pill at the center of the season to do so. Human blood keeps the creative spark alive, and Belle Noir is more than willingly to devour it. Not even babies are off limits, although she makes sure to keep her hands clean.
With Angela Bassett, her signature enunciation gave her lines flair and utmost importance. This being American Horror Story after all, full of over-the-top dialogue and characterization, Bassett sells it like the pro she is. Take her Ramona Royale in Hotel, a Pam Grier-like Blaxploitation actress who's featured in such films as Slaughter Sister and Bride of Blackenstein. She's on the hunt for Lady Gaga's Countess, but it might just be to rekindle their love affair rather than to kill her. As Desiree Dupree, Bassett is a gentle soul in Freakshow, a three-breasted woman who isn't afraid to turn murderous if it means she'll stay safe. With all that said, her introduction as Marie Laveau is still one hell of a greeting. Bassett sneers at the Salem witches on a throne of animal skulls and feathers, holding an iPad, and still maintains herself as a force to be reckoned with. Papa Mali's "Sugarland" can't be listened to without being considered the theme to this regal Voodoo Queen. Every time she utters the word, "witch," the seething undertones are more than clear.
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The impact of Sarah Paulson in this series cannot be understated. Although younger than the previous actresses mentioned, Paulson is just as important of a face. Like Sister Jude in Asylum, Paulson's journalist Lana Winters endures the season's best character arcs. Endured being the correct word. Stuck in Briarcliff for being a lesbian, Lana puts her trust in the wrong psychiatrist. Dr. Thredson (Zachary Quinto) ends up being Bloody Face, a killer who makes furniture out of his victim's flesh. While Lana may be tough, she ain't "no cookie." She not only succeeds in ending Thredson's killing spree, she becomes the famous journalist she aspired to be.
As recent as Red Tide, Paulson got to be the surprising heart to a very dark tale of seeking fame. TB Karen is a piece of work. She's homeless, always screaming in anger at nearly anyone, but she also holds a secret passion for painting. TB Karen knows the morbid commitment needed with the black pill. When she's forced into swallowing a pill, Karen decides on keeping as much humanity as possible. She finishes her painting before walking into the ocean to end her life before the black pill can destroy any more of it.
With the debut of American Horror Stories on Hulu, the franchise is paving new ground. It brought back the newer additions of Cody Fern and Billie Lourd, both in Apocalypse and 1984 . But there is something missing in those shorter segments, and it's what made the original so fantastic. American Horror Story delivered on the veteran talents of Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Frances Conroy, Angela Bassett, and Sarah Paulson. Renewed for three more seasons, hopefully it will keep on doing so.
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