For Sarah Paulson, “Hold Your Breath” brought a sigh of relief. Sure, the Emmy- and Tony-winner here plays a woman in the 1930s Dust Bowl who is convinced her children are in danger of an unseen monster dubbed Gray Man. But the experience acting in the horror-thriller made Paulson feel “liberated.”
“American Horror Story” icon Paulson makes her executive producer film debut with the feature, co-directed and co-written by Will Joines and Karrie Crouse (“Westworld”), who previously collaborated on the short film “Propagation.” Crouse’s script was developed in the Sundance Writers’ Lab, with “Hold Your Breath,” originally titled “Dust,” announced in 2022.
“It came to me because I guess Carrie and Will, our directors, thought of me for it,” Paulson told IndieWire, adding that the film was presented as a possible project for her to executive produce. “My agent … read it earlier on and had really liked it. I was very grateful for the opportunity. And I was just excited to be reunited with Searchlight, who was producing the movie, and I hadn’t worked with them in a long time. I was excited to collaborate on that level as well.”
Paulson previously starred in Searchlight releases like Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene.”
And while Paulson’s “Hold Your Breath” character Margaret seems to be part of Paulson’s collection of unhinged roles, Paulson can’t quite speak to how the feature fits into her filmography just yet because she still hasn’t seen it.
“Well, where it sits [in my filmography], I can’t really answer because the truth is, I haven’t seen it,” Paulson said. “As an EP, which this is my first time doing that on a film, I’ve seen some early cuts, but because I was doing this play [‘Appropriate’] in New York for almost the last year, I wasn’t able to see a final cut of the movie with all the music and everything in it. I’ve just only been told about it.”
She added, “Also, because I so dislike watching myself, I’ve sort of been putting it off. So I don’t know where it lives in the story of my thriller-horror workspace. But I know that I had an extraordinary time making it, and it was also really challenging because of all of the elements. It was a wild time, to be sure.”
That wildness extended to Paulson acting as if trying to escape from a seemingly made-up monster, who remains invisible onscreen for much of the film. But the monster’s unseen form only heightened Paulson’s experience of Margaret’s descent into delusion and desperation.
“I think it was helpful because it’s sort of what Margaret’s vantage point was. She was convinced that there was something out there that was unseeable or unknowable, and that was an interesting thing to do,” Paulson said. “I sometimes think about it like the great Shakespeare plays, where some of the great deaths don’t happen onstage, I think because what one imagines will often be far worse than what they could depict sometimes in a production, where you don’t have all the tricks of the camera to kind of hide some of the fake components of it. I just liked it, because it meant I could create whatever I wanted in my mind, to imagine what the Gray Man was and also to imagine the particles of dust in the air. It was helpful because it meant I could go as far as I wanted in my mind without having to have something literal to respond to.”
And while Paulson has portrayed her fair share of real-life people onscreen, including being controversially cast as Linda Tripp in Ryan Murphy’s “American Crime Story: Impeachment,” the actress found parallels in being “liberated” on “Hold Your Breath” to performing in a biopic or true story.
“Weirdly, it’s the way I feel about playing real people, too. It’s like you would think it would be a constraining reality, but it actually makes me feel more liberated because I have more information weirdly in that,” Paulson said of creating Margaret’s perceived reality. “It’s like, if you tell me this is who this person is, I can study it and watch it somehow. There is a complete knowingness of that, or as much as one can without really knowing the person, which means I’m completely free to do whatever I want within the confines of what I know to be true.”
Paulson continued, “Sometimes when you have carte blanche to do whatever, it ends up feeling a little bit…like if I could do anything, I don’t know what I would do as opposed to [that], you know what I mean? It’s a weird thing. I don’t know. It’s bizarre, which I know sort of contradicts what I just said, but that was what was true for this project. So all I can say is actors are nuts. I don’t even know what I mean. I’m like, this close to being committed.”
The experience of filming “Hold Your Breath” also extended back to the small screen, with Paulson later reuniting with her “Hold Your Breath” co-star Ebon Moss-Bachrach for a seminal episode of “The Bear” Season 2.
“I was just so grateful that I had a friend in Ebon who I just spent all this time with in Santa Fe doing a really different type of piece [with ‘Hold Your Breath’],” Paulson said. “We had to do all this crazy shit together, so I felt very comfortable and comforted to see him […] knowing that I had a friend there.”
“Hold Your Breath” starts streaming on Friday, October 3 on Hulu.
