Sarah Paulson is shrugging off criticism over her performance as Aileen Wuornos in the latest season of Monster.
The Emmy winner makes a small appearance in The Lizzie Borden Story as serial killer Wuornos, who murdered a string of men in Florida between 1989 and 1990.
Of course, Wuornos’ story was previously adapted for the screen once before, in the 2003 movie also named Monster, which earned Charlize Theron an Oscar win.
As a result, Paulson and Theron’s respective performances as Wuornos have been compared since the Netflix crime drama began streaming earlier this month, something the American Horror Story star has branded “weird”.
“It’s like, I didn’t set out to do something better than Charlize Theron. I didn’t set out to blast hers off the screen or something – as if anyone could ever do that,” she told the podcast Shut Up Evan, hailing Theron’s work as “the most glorious performance in the world”.
Defending her own performance, Paulson continued: “I’ve seen a lot of productions of Death Of A Salesman, and I’m so glad I saw Phillip Seymour Hoffman, but I’m equally glad I saw Nathan Lane. I don’t sit there and go, ‘Well, that was worthy, and this one is not’.
“To me, the experience of acting – the art of acting – is the exploration of human behaviour by way of our personal experience and by way of your personal interpretation.
“So this is my interpretation of Aileen Wuornos based on the research I did, and based on my personhood, and how it comes out through me. It’s not an attempt to do something like anybody ever did.”
The Lizzie Borden Story is the first to centre around a female character, and is also the first to take place before the 20th century.
As a result, the team applied plenty of artistic licence to their version of the story, including introducing a subplot about Aileen Wuornos being Lizzie Borden, none of which was based on fact.
Co-creator Ian Brennan recently claimed that connecting these two unrelated women was a way of highlighting the show’s central themes of “female rage”.
