What intrigued you about The Chair? Anything that takes place in a world unto itself is fascinating. I like stories that take place in schools. I could imagine myself as this professor very easily. Where did you get your vision for Joan? AmandaPeet, who wrote this, is a quite marvelous actress who is an equally marvelous writer. She said to me, “Joan is unfiltered.” So I just let things pop out. She’s also old; she’s coming to the latter moments of her life. She’s teaching at a school that probably wishes she would retire. It’s not a comfortable position, but she kicks against it as best she can. She also gets a little loaded at faculty gatherings. She’s fun and unpredictable. Tell us more about her. She’s a medievalist. I suppose this is arcane information and not that fascinating to the real public because not everybody even goes to college and gives a hang what happens there, but in the world of professors, people who teach English lit or the Americanists who teach American history and American literature, they only have to speak one language. As scholars, they don’t have a difficult road. They have to have read a lot of different writers and they have to know some history. But if you are a medievalist who teaches Chaucer, which my character does, you have to speak five languages. You have to speak Latin, German, French, Spanish and English. You have to be fluent; you have to really be literate in these languages to be a good scholar of that field. And yet in terms of student bodies at universities and colleges, probably a smaller percentage of people are interested in medieval literature than are in American literature. Joan’s not in a doomed field, but she’s in a very narrow, a very restricted field of interest. As an actor, you’re a storyteller. Is the subject matter of this of concern to you? Do you worry about the humanities programs in college and how that could affect the arts as well? I worry more about middle school and high school education in our country. The tech and the engineer studies are getting more favor and the world is becoming very tech-oriented. That’s probably a necessary thing for moving into the future. But I’m much more concerned when I think about public school education in America, which has slid so horribly in the past 65 years. When I was a student, there was a period where I went to public school when they were listed as No. 1 in the world. Middle school and high school is where character is formed, and America had the best public school system and the richest. We budgeted a great deal of money for education. It’s just eroded since then. In international rankings, we now rank 26th or 28th, depending on which study you look at in education in the world. We’re the richest country in the world, and that we should be 26th down the ranking in high school? This is where our young citizens are made. Speaking of citizens, we used to be taught civics, we used to have civics class, art class and music class in public school. That doesn’t exist much anymore. I think people graduate not knowing much about American history from the point of view of government. That’s what worries me, since you opened that can of worms. I worry about the broad populous that is not getting the education that we used to give. Most of your scenes in The Chair are with Sandra Oh. What was great about working with her? First of all, she’s kind of an icon. I’ve met her a number of times at awards shows and stuff like that, but I’ve never worked with her before. I was kind of intimidated, but she actually couldn’t be easier and is incredibly helpful and wants to know anything you need to help support the scene. It was just a piece of cake. It was great fun and, obviously, I feel very privileged to be in this show with her. You are also joining The Morning Show [on Apple TV+] for season two. How is working with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon? Jennifer and Reese are just so classy and so smooth. They work so beautifully with everybody. It was like being on a big aircraft carrier: There’s just an enormous sense of the importance of the size and the power of this show and the power of the people on it. On The Morning Show, you’re playing UBA’s savvy chairwoman Cybil Richards in season two. What kind of woman is she? I’m a visitor on that show on a sort of regular basis. It really is incredible. I would watch an episode and just come away exhausted from the screen because so much happens. The writing is so full adventure and unexpected twists and turns. This character comes in as sort of the ultimate power voice of the network. She’s not seen that often; she’s not needed that often. But when she comes in, she usually messes with Cory [BillyCrudup], who is the president or CEO of the network. She messes with something that he’s doing, sort of violently cripples some stunt that he pulled or blocks him from doing another one. I’ve had this kind of role a couple of times. I don’t know why I get these kinds of roles, but I do, where a woman who’s very well bred and very relaxed has ultimate power, so she doesn’t have to act in any way. She doesn’t have to raise her voice or fight for anything. She just says this is how it’s going to be, your contract is up. She just wields this enormous, utterly relaxed and confident, steely power. I think there’s only one scene in which she raises her voice, because she just doesn’t have to. These things are not that easy to play. You have to get into the place where you feel the stakes of the scene and you know you’re going to make one or two chess moves and that will change the course of the direction of the show at that moment. You have to really summon yourself to be all there and have incredible focus to stay very, very cool in a very hot moment. It’s really a pleasure for me. Also, the writing is so great, and the direction is great. MimiLeder is one of the creators and she directs usually, but they have other directors as well. It’s just a real class operation. And doing it in the middle of COVID. Of course, all of Hollywood has been continuing to function with these enormous COVID blankets over the whole thing. It’s very exacting, the regime and the precautions. It makes it very hard for the crew who are functioning very much burdened by those restrictions, by PPE and stuff. The directors too. I remember Mimi once behind a mask and a shield trying to talk to actors and trying to get everybody going in the scene. I thought, Wow, this is hard. It’s hard on everybody. Is the magnitude greater as a result of having Reese and Jennifer on it? No question, no question. It’s a very, very big deal. It’s obsessive. Once you watch it, you’re absolutely hooked. Being a player in it was a lot of fun. It’s very interesting, these parts in The Chair and The Morning Show could not be more contrasted. The Chair is very realistic and very gritty, real-life in a school. Then you have this hugely polished world of network television, these superstars. It’s really amazing to go back and forth between them. You left Two and a Half Men to do Ann, your critically acclaimed one-woman-show about Texas governor Ann Richards. Why walk away from a hit series to do a play? I think when [the TV series started] the writers were very interested in the mother-son relationship. They explored that, but by year six, the end of my contract, I wasn’t doing much. I said, “I’ll come back anytime you need me if you want me to come back to do a specific thing, but I have to be free to do other things now.” It’s amazing that you could remember all that dialogue for a one-woman show. That seems to be an area where I’m strong. You don’t know that until you are put to a test like that. But I’ve done that show now I guess in seven theaters. I did it at Galveston Opera House, the Empire in San Antonio, the Paramount in Austin, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center and the old Shubert in Chicago. Each time I did it there were very big changes to learn, like between the Kennedy Center and Broadway there was a year and I had really improved, polished and cut the play. Each time, I have to relearn it. The last time I did it was almost five years ago. I have to really relearn it. I have to tell you that never once in any of those performances did I ever forget a line. I guess, first of all, I learned very thoroughly I can’t rehearse it unless I have learned it. I don’t hold the book when I’m rehearsing. I think that really locks it in really, really well. Do you feel like you’re doing some of your best work now? Your Great Performances:Ann was memorable. I think acting is something like painting or any other art. You’re going to get more seasoned, you’re going to expand, and you’re going to keep growing. Sometimes, of course, very much older people become finer actors. What’s that thing about when you do something for 20,000 hours, you become an expert, you become a master? If you’re doing it for 40,000 hours, you become richer and richer. I think I don’t get in my way as much as an actor. I just know I have a sense of where I’m going, and I just go for it. I don’t question myself the way I did a lot when I was younger. I don’t worry about it as much as when I was younger. Certainly, doing Ann was, for me, such a big achievement: both writing it and making it happen in the first place, creating it and then acting quite a rigorous almost two-hour performance that literally has no pause. It makes you feel like, “Well, I guess I know what I’m doing so I should relax.” I’m actually supposed to do Ann again in about seven or eight months, early next spring, God willing, and if the theater is active and if people can go. Ann is a show that really has to be a full house because she’s speaking right to the audience. Only if shows are permitted to have their natural sellout status will we be putting it on. I think I’m doing that with the Pasadena Playhouse. I was to do it when we went into lockdown almost 18 months ago, whatever it was. That’s when I was going to be doing it and it was shutdown. I’ll be almost two years older. I’m already too old for that part, or for that effort, let’s put it that way. But I intend to do it, nonetheless. This last year’s been a rough one. What did it teach you about yourself? I’m not really that resourceful and so it’s actually made me want to get some help in figuring out how to direct my own life. Normally I’m very busy because I have demands on me, I have jobs that I get, a lot of them involve travel. So I have this illusion that I’ve got a very full life because I’m always getting on a plane and always doing this part and that part, or doing this press interview, or doing this red carpet. There’s this sense of busyness that when those things came to a stop, I found it very hard to do productive, interesting and fun things for myself. I was sort of at a loss. At my age, I was sort of surprised and not to say a little depressed by that. I actually am taking steps to direct myself to almost make a schedule for myself as if I did have an outer demand, as if I did have a job. I figure out and block out the week and things that I wanted to do by this time and that time—get this finished by Wednesday and start that on Friday. Because if I’m just simply left with a wide-open slate, I get depressed, I get at a loss and don’t function well. This is really kind of shocking to me. I’m taking myself in hand. I want to spend this period of my life happily involved in good things. I don’t want to lie around being depressed and worrying what to do, and we’re not out of this thing by a long shot. You said you want to do happy things. Does that mean that you and your partner, Sarah Paulson, are looking for a project to do together? You both are held in esteem as actresses; it seems you should be able to make it happen. I think other people have had those thoughts, but we have not actively been pursuing that or looking for that. She’s booked. She has a couple of projects lined up waiting for her to do when she finishes Impeachment, which she has about two and a half more months to work on. That would be the longest job I ever heard of with someone in a lot of prosthetics and makeup. She even wears teeth and a wig. She’s really very, very burdened to cope with this kind of effort to play that role. She’s been doing it for eight months. Usually, you think of somebody making a movie or a television show, they’re just a month or two in and she has two more months of that to go, and then she has a couple of projects to do right afterwards. My jobs come and go; she has lots waiting. I don’t think she has any open space. I would think Ryan Murphy would want to add you to his ensemble. Well, I did do Hollywood for him and that was great. That was one of my favorite all-time roles. I just loved that. You never know what will come. I know that we would act well together because we think similarly about acting and we respect certain ways of acting with your partners and with your teammates, relating to each other, and working with a director. But I tend to think it would be quite distracting to an audience. In the old days of Hollywood, stars really didn’t want people to know anything about them because it interfered with your ability to appreciate them in a role. I don’t know that that’s entirely true. But I never want to know much about actors. If I see two actors that are in a relationship together in a movie it probably would serve to distract me more than enlighten me. So I think that might be true. In Hollywood, the character you played was a strong woman. Don’t you wish Hollywood had really been like that? Actually, there were a couple of women like that in Hollywood who were very powerful. But because of the epoch, they didn’t long to be in the limelight or to be in front of the studio or written on the walls of the studio as being the president of it or whatever. There were a lot of women who were behind the scenes who were extremely powerful at the studios. This character is sort of modeled on one of them. That kind of wonderful woman existed in that time and was associated with important directors and bringing up stars and encouraging them and even cultivating them. She had a very real texture for me. She felt terrifically real to me.
