Sarah Paulson Says Pedro Pascal Is 'Always Trying' to Make Her Watch Scary Movies — but She 'Just Can't' (Exclusive)
“I'm such a ninny when it comes to horror stuff,” Paulson tells PEOPLE while discussing her upcoming thriller, 'Hold Your Breath'
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Sarah Paulson and Pedro PascalShe may be a bonafide scream queen, but nobody can drag Sarah Paulson to see a scary movie — not even Pedro Pascal!
While chatting with PEOPLE about her upcoming thriller, Hold Your Breath, the actress admits that despite her iconic performances in the genre — and love for her fellow scream queens — she cannot bring herself to watch most horror.
“I'm such a ninny when it comes to horror stuff,” Paulson, 49, tells PEOPLE. “Not to evoke Pedro Pascal, 'cause I feel like my friendship with him … I don't want it to get in the way of my talking about this movie, but he's the person who is always trying to get me to go see scary movies.”
One such movie was Hereditary. While Paulson's turn as grieving mother Margaret in Hold Your Breath evokes Toni Collette’s iconic performance in the 2018 film, the star took no direct inspiration because, well, she never saw it.
“I remember [Pascal] talking about Hereditary and being like, ‘You have to see this movie.’ And I was like, ‘There's no f------ way I am going to see that movie,’ ” she recalls. “Everyone I know wants me to go see all the Conjuring movies 'cause I love Vera Farmiga, and it's like… I just can't do it.”
Despite The Last of Us star's persistence and her “reverence” for horror greats like Collette, Farmiga and Mia Goth — “one of my favorites of all time” — Paulson simply cannot bring herself to enjoy the genre.
“I just can't watch the movies,” she tells PEOPLE. “I'm sorry, I love you all. You're all geniuses. I wish I could see it and steal everything that you're doing and pass it off as my own invention, but I just can't do it."
Don't get it twisted, though — Paulson has long felt at home in horror.
“I feel like a lot of people are very interested in casualizing things as actors, in order to make it feel real. But the reason I love working in this genre is that there is no part of a person in these stories that doesn't feel like what is happening to them is literally life and death,” she says. “Because usually in these stories, in the genre, it is.”
“So my penchant for the dramatic — you know, my mother called me Sarah Bernhardt as a child, which I can talk to my therapist about what that does to a person — but basically I always had big reactions to things,” she continues. “And I feel like in that world, it really lends itself.”
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After getting her “feet wet in the horror world” through American Horror Story, Paulson’s relationship with the genre blossomed from a love match into a “wonderful marriage” — and if Hold Your Breath is any indication, she’s still in the honeymoon phase.
“I could do all that stuff on American Horror Story and never feel like I was overdoing it,” she says. “It was like the bigger the better, and I don't mean be big just for big’s sake, but I mean the more important something was to any character I was playing, the more robust the response could be.”
So, her inability to stomach scary films aside, "this genre and I are just a nice marriage," she says. "A nice arrangement.”
Hold Your Breath is on Hulu Oct. 3.
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