Unlike, say, Rebecca Ferguson, Sarah Paulson won’t make you guess who slighted her; she’s naming the woman who came to her play and had plenty of critical things to say afterward.
In her interview this week on the Smartless podcast with hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett, Paulson expressed how “outrageous” it was that fellow actress Trish Hawkins, a friend of her mother’s, attended her stage play performance and brought some nasty vibes.
Paulson said Hawkins and her mother “were in some kind of writing group together,” and “my mother thought it’d be great to bring Trish Hawkins” to her performance in Talley’s Folly.
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“The last time I was on stage, I did a play called Talley’s Folly at the Roundabout,” Paulson began the story. “And I’m going to say this, and I’m not going to ask you to cut this out, because I don’t fucking care—this actress came to the play. Her name is Trish Hawkins. Hi, Trish!”
Realizing she’d just named her critic, Paulson had a moment of clarity before deciding she was going to go all the way.
“Am I going to get sued? I don’t care, because I think this is outrageous,” she said before dishing the details. “She came to the play, she looked at me up and down, and then she went, ‘Your dress is yellow. Mine was pink.’ And I thought, ‘What?’”
That awkward interaction was just a little taste of what would follow, Paulson revealed. “Cut to two days later, I got an email that was six pages long of notes—and a communication to me about what she had done when she had done the play, and what she recommended I do.”
Paulson said she was outraged—and she still has the email. “It was really outrageous,” she said. “Trish Hawkins: I have not forgotten it. And I hope to see you never.”
Paulson clarified that she doesn’t mind in-depth criticism; for instance, she said, “if you are a person that I love and admire and I say to you, ‘tell me what you thought, really’—especially [for] early days previews or something.” But Hawkins, a woman she’d never met, had taken things too far.
Paulson admitted that “my mom’s gonna get so upset” about her calling out her friend—but she doesn’t regret it at all. In fact, she’d even take it a step further. After Arnett pointed out that “Trish is about to get the bombardment” from people who find her now that she’s been named, Paulson said it’ll be “the [bombardment] she deserves.”
“‘Cause guess what? I’ll put that email on Instagram faster than you can say Trish Hawkins,” she concluded.
