Part 1
Pull up a stool, because you need to understand the absolute lightning bolt that was Sarah Paulson before Ryan Murphy turned her into the undisputed supreme of prestige television. You know that famous clip from the 2005 Tony Awards where Cherry Jones wins Best Actress in a Play for *Doubt*, and before she even stands up, this blonde stunner grabs her face and plants a massive, breathless kiss right on her mouth? That was not a carefully coordinated PR move. That was sheer, unmeditated impulse.
Years after that broadcast shook the theater world, Sarah sat down for a candid sit-down with the gay press for *SheWired*. The interviewer wasn't some random junket journalist trying to squeeze out a snappy quote for the trades. It was her actual sister, Rita Paulson. That sibling dynamic breaks open the kind of hilarious, unfiltered gold you only get when two people share the same childhood dinner table.
If you've ever wondered what it feels like to accidentally kick open the closet door in front of millions of live viewers, Sarah laid the whole saga out bare. She had never been in a serious relationship with a woman before Cherry. As Sarah put it with zero sugarcoating, drunken make-outs at parties didn't count; Cherry was the real deal. When Cherry won, Sarah didn't think about the cameras, the industry, or the morning headlines. Her heart just jumped out of her chest.
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Naturally, the immediate aftermath was pure chaos. The moment the ceremony wrapped, Sarah got the dreaded call from her publicist: 'So... what were you doing?' Sarah genuinely hadn't calculated the fallout because she was just dizzyingly, madly in love. What made the entire moment delightfully messy was that Cherry went up to the podium and thanked her character instead of Sarah by name, even though they had just lip-locked on primetime television.
Growing Up Paulson: The Danza Paradox and Childhood Crushes
Before digging into the heavy industry politics, Rita took things straight back to childhood crushes, and Sarah's answers are a pure early-nineties time capsule. Her very first screen crush wasn't some brooding teen heartthrob; it was Brian Bloom, though Sarah quickly noted with a laugh that he kind of looked like a girl anyway. Then came the Alyssa Milano obsession on *Who's the Boss?*, specifically because young Sarah desperately wanted to be Samantha Micelli with her baseball glove and tomboy swagger.
That *Who's the Boss?* fixation came full circle years later when Sarah shared a screen with the legendary Judith Light, an encounter Sarah still considers one of the absolute peaks of her acting life. But the sibling banter peaked when the sisters pointed out that Tony Danza happens to look shockingly like their biological father. Even wilder? Sarah insists their dad also shares an uncanny resemblance to Ellen DeGeneres.
Because Sarah and Rita share the same father but have different mothers, Sarah jokingly credited him with passing down what she called the 'gay gene' to both of them. Looking back at high school, Sarah never dated boys. It wasn't out of open rebellion; it just simply wasn't for her, even if it took her until adulthood to fully piece together what that meant.
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Pop Royalty, Car Karaoke, and the Gaga Conversion
You want to know what someone is really like when the cameras shut down? Ask them what they scream-sing when they're stuck in Los Angeles traffic with the windows rolled up. For Sarah, that era was defined by a massive turn toward Lady Gaga. She admitted she was a total skeptic early on, dismissing Mother Monster as an eccentric weirdo whose tunes felt dubious. But once tracks like 'Paparazzi' and 'Bad Romance' took hold, she became a full-blown disciple.
Mix in heavy rotations of Kelly Clarkson's heartbreak anthems like 'Since U Been Gone' and 'Already Gone', plus a clandestine refusal to change the radio station whenever Taylor Swift came on, and you get the ultimate solo highway setlist. Rita also threw in an utterly unhinged hypothetical about where Sarah would keep a live, non-returnable pet elephant. Sarah's instantly pragmatic answer? Don't even try to park it in the backyard; march that beast directly to the zoo.
The Realities of Being Out in Hollywood
When the talk pivoted to navigating an entertainment career as an openly queer woman, Sarah didn't offer pre-packaged inspirational slogans. She pointed out the huge cultural divide between living in major cosmopolitan theater hubs like New York—where she joked that if you aren't gay in the theater scene, you're the weirdo—and trying to navigate Middle America or corporate Hollywood film sets.
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She took a clear stand against the pressure that actors sometimes face from all sides: never out anyone else, and never force a performer onto a public soapbox before they are ready. Her core philosophy was simple: live your truth, whether that means shouting it from a mountaintop or quietly keeping your private life behind closed doors.
Her biggest anxiety as a working actor wasn't losing jobs because executives were homophobic; by her assessment, plenty of decision-makers in casting and production were queer themselves. Her actual fear was about the craft. The more intimate details an audience knows about an actor's private life, the harder it becomes for that actor to completely disappear into a role without viewers projecting real-world trivia onto the screen.
