VF Daily: How has it been to be back onstage? You’re no stranger to the theater.

Sarah Paulson: It’s pretty exciting. The last play I did was another two-character play on Broadway, with Linda Lavin. It was a Donald Margulies play. So this was the first time I’ve been onstage in three years, and it was both totally exciting and completely petrifying, as everything involving theater is.

I know we’ve seen you a lot in film and even more so on television lately. Is theater something you were looking to do again?

In my fantasy I would like to be onstage once a year. Sometimes it doesn’t work out with the timing of a TV schedule. I prefer to be onstage as much as possible, but the great parts don’t come along that much and sometimes really famous movie stars snatch them up.

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MMA BROWN: I just saw Talley’s Folly, and you’re onstage for the entire play. That must be exhausting.

PAULSON: [laughs] It is exhausting. I’ve done it one other time. I did a two-character play, or a two-hander as they like to call them, with Linda Lavin on Broadway two years ago. A Donald Margulies play called Collected Stories (2010). This play is very different, though, because there are no intermissions. Once you enter the stage, you never leave. In [Collected Stories], it was just two characters, but there was Act One, Scene One. We got to have blackouts. We would have scene changes. You have a second to get your head around about what you’ve got to do next in the play. This is, ostensibly, a 96-minute scene—there aren’t any set changes or blackouts. It’s just one continuous thing to play. Energetically, it’s harder to do than I anticipated, for sure.

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