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    First-Time Tony Winners on Their Awards: Daniel Radcliffe, Kecia Lewis and More

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    All of the actors who took home Tonys were first-time winners. Here’s what they had to say after their wins.All of the performers who received Tony Awards last night have one thing in common: they were all first-time honorees. After accepting their prizes, the winners trekked across the Lincoln Center plaza to a press room where they answered questions from The New York Times and reporters from other news outlets. Here’s a sampling of what they said.Daniel Radcliffe, “Merrily We Roll Along”Radcliffe won best featured actor in a musical for his performance as the lyricist Charley Kringas in a revival of Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.” It’s Radcliffe’s fifth Broadway show, but the first for which he was nominated for a Tony.What has the “Merrily” journey been like for you?It’s been a dream, especially with it ending like this. My singing teacher, who I mentioned, one of the first things he ever had me sing to him was “Good Thing Going” whenever I worked with him for “Equus.” Going from singing that for the first time in his office in London to singing it onstage and now this, it’s insane.What’s it like to find new success after spending so much of your career in your childhood on “Harry Potter?”When I finished “Potter,” I had no idea what my career was going to be. I had already started doing some stage stuff, but I didn’t know what the future held. To have had the last year with playing Weird Al [in the 2022 movie “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”] and also doing “Merrily We Roll Along,” it’s been awesome. And I do think playing a character for a long time builds up in you a desire to sort of do as many things as you possibly can. I’m doing that right now.Talk a little bit about the process of learning “Franklin Shepard, Inc.?” It’s a huge moment in the show and a huge patter song.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Daniel Radcliffe, Pete Townshend and Sarah Paulson Party for the Tonys

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      The actress Kara Young stood surrounded by admirers inside David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center around 1 a.m. on Monday morning, fielding a swarm of well-wishers after winning her first Tony Award, for featured actress in the comedy “Purlie Victorious.” Her older brother hovered close by and periodically fanned out the train of her lime chiffon dress.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the 39-year-old playwright who penned the night’s best play revival, the searing family drama “Appropriate” — and a fellow first-time Tony winner — was next in line to compliment Ms. Young and her gown from the designer Bibhu Mohapatra.“This is a forever iconic Tonys look,” Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins told the actress. “When we’re like 70 years old, they’re going to show you in this.”The performers Kecia Lewis and Camille A. Brown.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe actresses Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesBranden Jacobs-Jenkins, the playwright.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe performers Shaina Taub and Matt Gehring.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt was a flash forward on a night when, for many of the Tony Award winners, anything seemed possible. All eight of the acting honorees, across plays and musicals, earned their first-ever Tony wins on Sunday — some for their first major Broadway role or their first nomination, others after four decades in the theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sarah Paulson Wins Her First Tony for Best Actress in a Play

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      Sarah Paulson won the Tony Award for best actress in a play for her performance in the family drama “Appropriate.” This is Paulson’s first Tony.An Emmy winner who made her name in television, Paulson, in her first stage role in a decade, appears in the Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play as a sharp-tongued elder sister who is reunited with her siblings to deal with their deceased father’s estate.“Appropriate,” which won best revival of a play on Sunday, became one of the buzziest shows of the year, partly because of Paulson’s star power.The role takes endurance. Set at the family’s home in Arkansas, the play is largely propelled by the reactionary anger of Paulson’s character, Toni Lafayette, who is seeking to protect her father’s legacy from mounting evidence that he harbored racist convictions. Her approach involves searing insults aimed at her siblings, played by Michael Esper and Corey Stoll.Thanking Jacobs-Jenkins in her acceptance speech, Paulson said: “I will never be able to convey my gratitude to you for trusting me, for letting me hold the hand of Toni Lafayette, a woman you have written who makes no apology, who isn’t begging to be liked or approved of but does hope to be seen.”Though Paulson has found fame in television series like “American Horror Story” and “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” — winning an Emmy for her performance as the prosecutor Marcia Clark — her career has roots in theater. And she was exposed to Broadway early on. After she moved to New York City as a child, her mother worked as a waitress at Sardi’s, a Broadway haunt that just so happens to be next door to the theater where “Appropriate” opened in December.Paulson’s first job out of high school was as an understudy on Broadway for Amy Ryan in “The Sisters Rosensweig.” (Ryan, who starred in the play “Doubt,” was also nominated in the leading actress category this year.)The nominees also included two movie stars: Jessica Lange for “Mother Play” and Rachel McAdams for “Mary Jane.” Betsy Aidem was nominated for “Prayer for the French Republic.”Paulson’s win carried echoes of the Tony Awards in 2005, when her girlfriend at the time, the actress Cherry Jones, won the award for her performance in the original production of “Doubt.” Paulson, who was seated beside her, kissed Jones ahead of her acceptance speech, coming out publicly for the first time as being in a relationship with a woman.On Sunday, when she won the award, Paulson kissed her longtime partner, the actress Holland Taylor. More

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      Sarah Paulson Dares to Play the People You Love to Hate

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      Sarah Paulson still doesn’t fully understand why fans call her “mother.”At first, when she started seeing the word used online to describe her, she was bewildered and a bit irritated. She was in her 40s and childless. Did these people really think she looked like their mother?Once she began to understand it as an age-neutral compliment — a term Gen Z likes to use for famous women they adore — she leaned into the meme, appearing on “Saturday Night Live” last year, alongside Pedro Pascal, in a sketch in which he was “father” and she “mother” to a group of enamored high schoolers.“How did this happen to us?” Paulson wondered about her and Pascal, a longtime friend. “We were two 18-year-old kids who used to go to Sheep Meadow and smoke pot and go see Peter Weir movies. How did we become the mother and father of children on the internet?”For Paulson, the answer is a 30-year career that has wound its way from television bit parts to meaty lead roles as fraught real-life people. It is animated by an eclectic cast of characters orchestrated by the television producer Ryan Murphy, including conjoined twins, a Craigslist psychic, a ghost with a past as a heroin addict, an evil nurse and two of the most ridiculed and obsessed-over women of the 1990s.Paulson has long dared to play characters that viewers are liable to dislike — or downright loathe — and the role that has led to her first Tony nomination is one of her most provocative yet.In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s family drama “Appropriate,” her character is often the one audience members are rooting against: a sharp-tongued elder sister who lashes out against mounting suspicions that her recently deceased father harbored racist convictions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sarah Paulson on Her First Tony Nomination for ‘Appropriate’

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      After Sarah Paulson moved to New York City when she was a young girl, her mother took a job as a waitress at Sardi’s, a storied Broadway restaurant. It opened up a world that she would not have otherwise been exposed to, helping to nurture her ambitions of performing onstage.Paulson’s first acting job, at 19, was as a Broadway understudy, beginning a career that returned to the stage several more times but found its rhythm on television, with steady roles on Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” and a career-defining turn as the prosecutor Marcia Clark in the limited series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” for which she won an Emmy.Despite complex roles as famous public figures and, once, a pair of conjoined twins, Paulson said her most challenging role has been in the Broadway drama “Appropriate,” for which she received a Tony nomination for best leading actress in a play on Tuesday.In “Appropriate,” a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Paulson plays an older sister clinging to her memories of her father as she and her siblings clear out his home after his death, confronting the family’s dark secrets and their grievances against one another in the process. In the script, Paulson gets to play with cutting insults, weighty monologues and plenty of yelling.After learning of the news while still in bed, hours before taking the stage again, Paulson spoke about the endurance that it takes to be a stage actor and about her career coming full circle. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me how you’re feeling right now about your first Tony nomination.I feel very moved and certainly overwhelmed to be in a category with such extraordinary women, some of whom are my friends. More than anything there’s that little girl in me who moved to New York at 5 years old and whose mother got a job as a waitress at this theater hangout, to wake up and have a Tony nomination for the first time in my life, at 49, feels just wildly moving to me and something that I have dreamed about since I was a girl.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Sarah Paulson Makes a Horrible Discovery in “Appropriate”

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      Making a blistering Broadway debut, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 play about the legacies of hatred feels like a new work entirely.Think of the worst person you know: the kind who blabs people’s secrets, mocks their diction, dismisses their pain while making festivals of her own. Throw in a tendency toward casual antisemitic slurs, for which she thinks she has a free pass, and a “What’s the big deal?” approach to racism.Now add a deep wound and a wicked tongue and you’re almost partway to Antoinette Lafayette, the monster played by Sarah Paulson in the blistering revival of “Appropriate” that opened on Broadway on Monday. Recalling yet somehow outstripping the thrilling vileness of theatrical viragos like Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Violet in “August: Osage County,” she is the burned-out core of a nuclear family reactor, taking no prisoners and taking no blame.But even in Paulson’s eye-opening, sinus-clearing performance, Toni, as she’s called, doesn’t sum up the outrageousness of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, which has a deep wound and wicked tongue of its own. To get all the way to its sweet spot — and Lila Neugebauer’s production for Second Stage definitely gets there — you must further multiply Toni by her brothers, each awful in his own way.Bo (Corey Stoll) is passive and entitled, content to let others fail as long as he can’t be faulted. Frank (Michael Esper) is a serial screw-up, the rare person for whom statutory rape is not the worst thing on his résumé. At the heart of their grievances is greed — Bo’s for money, Frank’s for forgiveness and Toni’s for revenge.So when the three, accompanied by their assorted spouses, children, enablers and ghosts, gather in the grand dramatic tradition to dispose of their late father’s estate, you know things are going to explode. Indeed, as the curtain rises at the Helen Hayes Theater, it appears they already have. The Arkansas plantation house in which generations of the family have lived, in eyeshot of the cemetery where generations of their slaves are buried, is now a hellhole in spirit and fact. The once grand building is collapsing under the weight of centuries of evil and, more recently, decades of hoarding.Michael Esper, left, and Elle Fanning as an engaged couple in Second Stage Theater’s production of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe two seemingly incompatible stories — the evil and the hoarding, one national, one domestic — come together in a way I don’t want to spoil; it’s part of the brilliance of the play that it lands its biggest surprises with satisfying thumps at exactly the right moments. Suffice to say that when horrible relics of the past, both the country’s and the family’s, are discovered in the clutter, they force the Lafayettes to re-examine the legacy of their father, supposedly once in line to be a Supreme Court justice but also, depending on whom you ask, a saint or a psychopath.To Toni he was “a thinker! A loving person!” Frank says he was bipolar and abusive. Bo is too avoidant to offer a strong opinion, but his wife, Rachael (Natalie Gold), makes up for that. To her there is no question the old man was an antisemite (she once overheard him refer to her as Bo’s “Jew wife”) and a racist. Even so, she has insisted on bringing the couple’s children — a petulant 13-year-old girl (Alyssa Emily Marvin) and a hyperactive 8-year-old boy (Lincoln Cohen, on the night I saw it, and, alternating in the role, Everett Sobers) — to experience their “roots” as part of “a little American history Southern tour-type thing.”It’s the kind of laugh line — there are also guffaws, cackles and strange gasp-giggle combos — that works because we think we know more than she does. But it’s also a stinger because, the play suggests, we may not. In “Appropriate,” the “little American history Southern tour-type thing” is meant for the audience, too.That history is of course full of horrors, not the golden past portrayed in works about the gracious days of juleps and spirituals. But neither is it, for Jacobs-Jenkins, as neatly political and singularly damning as when filtered through a progressive lens. Questioning whether racism and antisemitism are really the core sins of this particular family, “Appropriate” posits that the problem may instead be that they’re just personally hideous. And if that’s true, could it also be true that the various institutions of subjugation so rampant throughout human society are nothing more (or less) than convenient formats for the expression of hate hard-wired in our hearts?Cherry-picking some of the worst examples imaginable — the play also features Elle Fanning as Frank’s sententious, sage-smudging fiancée and Graham Campbell as Toni’s drug-dealing son — Jacobs-Jenkins makes a convincing if despairing case. That he does so largely through comedy and melodrama (with an astonishing coda of surrealism) makes “Appropriate” easier to enjoy than to understand. The grammatically two-faced title doesn’t help, but easy understanding is not what the author appears to be after.The director Lila Neugebauer accentuates the conflicts and alliances among the characters, our critic writes. The cast includes, from left, Natalie Gold, Stoll, Paulson, Fanning, Graham Campbell and, above, Alyssa Emily Marvin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI have to admit that when I first saw it, at the Signature Theater in 2014, neither understanding nor enjoyment were forthcoming. Rereading my scathing review in light of what is obviously a rave today, I am forced to grapple with my own past, and the play’s. It would be easy to say that the difference between then and now is the heavy rewriting Jacobs-Jenkins has done in the interim. And certainly, comparing the two scripts, I see the clearer dramatic architecture and sharper point-of-view that a playwright in his prime, at 38, can impose. (I thought Jacobs-Jenkins’s most recent play, “The Comeuppance,” was one of the best of 2023.)It would also be easy to attribute the improvement to Neugebauer’s direction, which is so smart and swift for most of the play’s substantial length that you feel gripped by storytelling without being strangled by argument. Her staging, on a towering double-decker set by the design collective dots, is also nearly ideal, accentuating (with the help of Jane Cox’s painterly lighting) the conflicts and alliances among the characters. And the daredevil cast, instead of reveling in falling apart, focuses for as long as possible on keeping it together. We thus experience, in the force of that repression, just how awful human awfulness must be if human will cannot ultimately corral it.Though all those improvements are real, they do not fully explain why I’ve flipped for this revival. Perhaps this does: Playwrights who show us things we are reluctant to see may have to teach us, over time, how to see it. And we must be willing to have our eyes opened. I guess I’ve changed at least that much in 10 years of reviewing, and Jacobs-Jenkins is part of the reason.AppropriateThrough March 3 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Revisits His ‘Illusion of Suffering’ on Broadway

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      As with so many family reunion plays, the squabbling Lafayette siblings in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate” dislodge their share of skeletons from the closets of their childhood home, a former plantation in southern Arkansas. But here those secrets, hovering over everything and everyone, may be actual skeletons, and worse. The increasingly unsettling revelations power what The New York Times’s Ben Brantley called a “very fine, subversively original new play” at its Off Broadway premiere in 2014 at the Signature Theater.So subversive and so original that it took almost a decade to reach Broadway. Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient whose works include bold reimaginings of “The Octoroon” and the 15th-century play “Everyman,” got there a bit earlier when he contributed original material to a 2022 revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Second Stage’s production of “Appropriate,” which is in previews at the Helen Hayes Theater and opens on Dec. 18, is his first original work on Broadway after nearly a half-dozen New York productions.As it happens, two of the three actors playing the siblings had their own shared history. Sarah Paulson (“American Horror Story”) and Corey Stoll (“Billions”) were a year apart at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York, but they didn’t work together until Stoll briefly joined the cast of the Paulson-led TV series “Ratched” in 2020. (She fantasized about sawing his leg off during sex, he squashed a leech with his bare hand, and she tried to boil him alive in a hydrotherapy tub — all in the span of two episodes.)The two actors joined Jacobs-Jenkins and the director, Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Everybody”), backstage at the Helen Hayes last month to discuss catharsis, sibling rivalry and the tyranny of stage directions. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Michael Esper, Stoll, Natalie Gold and Paulson in the Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLila didn’t direct “Appropriate” Off Broadway, but the two of you have been in each other’s orbit for a while.BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS We actually met at the Humana Festival, where the show premiered in 2013.LILA NEUGEBAUER I was there with a different play.JACOBS-JENKINS Shortly after “Appropriate” happened at the Signature, Lila directed a production of it at Juilliard. I just knew instantly that she had grasped something about the undercurrents and the essential energies of the play.Sarah and Corey, when did you come on board?SARAH PAULSON I read the play in September of 2021. I hadn’t read anything as complicated and deep and funny in a very, very long time, and I said yes almost immediately.COREY STOLL Right in the depth of the pandemic, my agent sent me a stack of plays. It was like: “Since you’re not doing anything, I just want you to read all these plays.” And this one was so clearly the one to do.One character alludes to “the universality of suffering,” but there’s suffering and then there’s suffering. You’ve got these three siblings and all the bad things they’ve done, even criminal things …PAULSON It’s not me who’s done the criminal things. Write that down.STOLL Sarah is a real advocate for her character. You [to Paulson] cannot stand people talking ill of her.PAULSON It’s easy to do when a person isn’t thinking critically or deeply about who she is.My point is that these actions pale in comparison to the suffering inflicted on the play’s Black characters, whom we never meet. It feels almost like that line of dialogue is trying to level a playing field that ought not be leveled. Am I reading too much into the text?JACOBS-JENKINS When I wrote it, I was really interested in this writer named Dion Boucicault. He has this essay, “The Art of Dramatic Composition,” where he says the sole purpose of everything in the theater is to create an illusion of suffering that then creates something cathartic in the audience. I believe that everyone onstage is suffering. They all believe they are suffering. But how do we judge — how can we judge — someone else as suffering or not? I think that’s one of the games that the play is trying to get us to play.Have these ideas also evolved for you, Lila, now that you have directed “Appropriate” twice?NEUGEBAUER The first time, the play struck me on more theoretical terms. Now I feel more of an invitation to have complicated feelings about these characters. Every character has done something that someone in the audience or someone onstage might feel is questionable or strange or other. Every person walking the planet is the star of their own lives. Therefore, it feels like the thing that’s happening to them is the most significant thing that could ever be happening to anyone.“The play does a lot of that work in terms of how to create the sibling dynamic,” said Paulson, center, with Alyssa Emily Marvin, left, and Esper.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe presence of siblings can be a pretty quick reminder that there are other people in the world. Is it hard creating that rapport?PAULSON It doesn’t hurt that we know each other and have worked together, but I would argue that the play does a lot of that work in terms of how to create the sibling dynamic.STOLL There’s a momentum to the arguments between these two. At first, it just seems like these are two people who despise each other. Then you get to the second act where the whole play downshifts a bit, and we can find an intimacy. Even though that conflict is still very hot, and there is still a whole lifetime of resentment, that intimacy is there.PAULSON And I want to stress that we are missing Michael Esper, the third end of the triangle, who is wonderful.I remember Larissa FastHorse said “The Thanksgiving Play,” with its all-white Broadway cast, was a response to what she had been told about who was castable. Young Jean Lee has written great works, and “Straight White Men” was the one to reach Broadway. Now “Appropriate” has an all-white cast. Does this say anything about the American theater today?JACOBS-JENKINS There’s a phenomenon that’s been written about in academia called the “white life novel.” “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin is an example. Zora Neale Hurston has a book called “Seraph on the Suwanee.” It’s this thing where Black writers or Black-identified writers will write one thing that’s all white people. I think this is often an experiment in trying to get the viewer or even an industry to own its own blind spots.I’ve talked a lot about reading The Times’s review of “Stick Fly” by Lydia Diamond, which is an amazing family drama that was critiqued for not being enough about race and class in America and for being melodramatic. And then an equally wonderful play by Tracy Letts called “August: Osage County” was praised for being familiar by the same critic. There was no mention of the way that I think Tracy was actually engaging in very smart ways with whiteness and Indigenous presence. That double standard was very informative to me as a young writer who is constantly asked to do articles for The Times about Black drama.Honestly, everybody onstage is a political statement. Nobody’s a neutral body. And until you can talk about that, there’s nothing to pat ourselves on the back about as an art form in terms of how we do or don’t deal with these issues. I love Tennessee Williams. I love “The Piano Lesson” by August Wilson. No one calls “The Piano Lesson” a family drama. They call it about the Black experience in America. No one ever talks about “A Raisin in the Sun” as one of our best family dramas. I want to be able to love and own these things equally. And I feel like even this question is part of that continuum of things I have to address that no one else has to address when we make work in America.Can I ask about the stage directions in the script? They are ——JACOBS-JENKINS Chaos.They do sometimes go on for a page and a half. It reminded me of reading Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.JACOBS-JENKINS When I started writing this, I was drunk on Williams and O’Neill. The reading experience is different than the experience of seeing the piece in a theatrical space. Your task as a playwright is to light up the things inside of people that lead them to the most electric choice. And that’s just as true for the reader. You’re trying to inspire the reader to bring more than just something schematic or familiar to the script.And when the script reaches the three of you, do you see those directions as marching orders?PAULSON It depends. Most of the plays I’ve done have been by people like Tennessee Williams or Lanford Wilson, people who were already dead. I’ll read a Williams stage direction and think, “Is that what Laurette Taylor did? Because I definitely want to do that if she did it.” For me, they can be incredibly evocative and other times they feel almost directorial.STOLL I tend to bristle against them in film and television because I think they’re often overprescribed, but here I’ve found them to be really helpful. Look, I’m happy with any help I can get.“At first, it just seems like these are two people who despise each other. Then you get to the second act where the whole play downshifts a bit, and we can find an intimacy,” Stoll said of the characters that he and Paulson portray. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesHow about you, Lila? If they can be overly directorial, where does that leave you?NEUGEBAUER This is a bit of a spoiler, but there’s a bunch of information in the script about what might happen at the end of the play. I feel that the writer is spell casting with that text. He is giving me and the designers this spectacular provocation to use our imaginations, to make that spell manifest. It’s within the power of our theatrical machinery to show pretty much anything, but everything that happens onstage also has emotional information. It’s not just a literal event.In other words, Branden, I don’t think they’re listening to you.JACOBS-JENKINS Actors love to say, “The first thing I do is cross out all the stage directions.” And I’m like, “If we’re in the erasure business, I just take my delete button and now you have nothing to say.”A lot has happened in the 10 years since “Appropriate” premiered. How has that affected either the play itself or the way you think it will be received?JACOBS-JENKINS We definitely didn’t transfer to Broadway 10 years ago. So that’s a sign that something has shifted, maybe? The play was originally set in 2011, and there was a big debate about whether to update it. I didn’t think I could, because these people would look like true idiots if they had not paid attention to what everyone else has paid attention to since then.NEUGEBAUER I do think there has been a semi-mainstreaming of a certain degree of race consciousness in America that would make the events in this play not quite make sense if it were set in 2023. My suspicion is that audiences will bring a somewhat more nuanced vocabulary to it now. They have a different tool kit. And that’s going to be very interesting. More

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      ‘Impeachment’ Focuses on the Women Behind Clinton’s Scandals

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      Ryan Murphy’s anthology series “American Crime Story” debuted in 2016 with “The People v. O.J. Simpson.” A second installment, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” arrived two years later. In these initial series, which won 16 Emmy Awards between them, the crimes at issue were obvious: the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman; the killing of Versace.In “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” which premieres Sept. 7 on FX, the offenses are more ambiguous.Set in the 1990s, the 10-episode series revisits the miasma of scandal and innuendo that shrouded the Clinton White House: Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton; Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky; Lewinsky’s friendship with Linda Tripp; and the tangle of lies, half-truths and illicit recordings that were ultimately detailed in the Starr Report, the infamous and lurid document prepared by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The report led the House of Representatives, in 1998, to impeach President Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate, declining to remove him from office, found him not guilty.But those high crimes and misdemeanors didn’t especially interest the creators of “Impeachment.”Tina Thorpe/FX“To me, the crime is that Monica, Linda and Paula had no control over how they were perceived,” said Sarah Burgess, an executive producer who wrote most of the episodes. Burgess, a playwright, studied the media coverage of these women: the late-night punch lines, the drive-time banter, the scathing opinion columns. “It was unbelievable, the hate,” she said.Burgess was speaking on a recent Monday afternoon from the gleaming reading room in the cellar of the Whitby Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Murphy joined her, alongside the executive producers Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall and four of the actresses in the series: Annaleigh Ashford (Jones), Edie Falco (Hillary Clinton) Beanie Feldstein (Lewinsky) and Sarah Paulson (Tripp). Lewinsky, a producer on “Impeachment,” was not present. (No one else involved in the administration or its scandals worked on the show. Tripp died in 2020.)The series delves into the lives of Lewinsky, Tripp and Jones — and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton. Its aim is not necessarily rehabilitative, but the creators and actors wanted to understand the ambitions, fears and desires that motivated these women.“We all know what happened,” Murphy said. “But we don’t know how it happened.”In a round-table interview, the cast and creatives discussed how the Clinton era’s swirl of partisan politics and fungible notions of truth resonates today, as well as why these scandals still captivate us, how the media came for these women and whether we would treat them any better now.“I just hope when people watch this, they still feel implicated,” Simpson said. “We’re not that distant from it — this is a piece of history, but we are still living it.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Monica Lewinsky, seen here hugging President Clinton in 1996, Beanie FeldsteinAPTV, via Associated PressWhat do you remember about living through these scandals?ANNALEIGH ASHFORD I remember this era from a late-night comedy perspective. It was really dark and really chauvinistic, terrible to the women involved, so grossly sexual and inappropriate. And it was funny. We all clapped.RYAN MURPHY Monica and Linda and Paula — I remember just feeling that their lives were taken away from them. I felt very sympathetic, because I was picked on in high school, I guess. Just seeing them attacked and constantly made fun of — it was a national sport — I felt bad for them. And I continue to feel bad for them. When I ran into Monica at a party, we had announced that we were doing this. She came up, and I said, “I want you to be a part of this.”Why does this story still fascinate us?SARAH BURGESS The Starr Report is a part of that; it’s still shocking how explicit it is. And then Monica, I can’t think of someone else who has had that seething hatred that she experienced, that delight in taking her apart.BRAD SIMPSON The Clintons haven’t left us. We all remember the moment where Donald Trump brought the women who made accusations against Bill Clinton to the debates. It still haunts the culture.ALEXIS MARTIN WOODALL But the end of the day, it’s still a conversation about the women. Even in 2021, we’re still talking about Monica and Linda and Hillary. Bill’s not really part of that conversation.“I think more people would come to Monica’s defense today,” said Ryan Murphy, bottom left, with, clockwise, Sarah Burgess, Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesIn some ways, the impeachment trial prefigured today’s partisan politics. The left argued that Bill Clinton was the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. The right held that they had a duty to investigate a fundamentally dishonest leader. How does the series grapple with these two opposing narratives?MURPHY We present both points of view. That’s the interesting thing about the show, it lives in a gray world.SIMPSON Both things can be true. What we’re interested in, really, is flawed individuals intersecting with these systems of power, especially these systems of male power.Recently we seem to be re-examining the ways we treated women at the center of scandals in the ’90s and ’00s — Tonya Harding, Britney Spears. Is the series participating in that reassessment?BURGESS Yes, of course. I think about that a lot. There was no constituency for Monica. There was no one on her side. There was a faint heartbeat of, like, three feminists, somewhere. To watch Beanie play her and walk in her shoes and hopefully put us in a point of view to understand how young she was, I hope that does reorient how people think about her. But do you think it would be any different now?MURPHY If you look at the Britney Spears case, I think more people would come to Monica’s defense today.SARAH PAULSON I think there would be more defenders. But there would be an equal measure coming down on her. We have so many platforms from which to do that now.MARTIN WOODALL People I know, closely, when I talk about the show, they still make jokes. And I’m like, “Hey, stop it with the jokes.”“I really care about her as a character and as a person,” Beanie Feldstein said of Monica Lewinsky.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“I’m not trying to humanize her,” Sarah Paulson said of playing Linda Tripp.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“How did this woman make sense of any of this?” Edie Falco said about Hillary Clinton.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“There’s a real childlike quality,” Annaleigh Ashford said of playing Paula Jones.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesClinton’s popularity soared. Lewinsky became a punchline. Why did we hate this woman so much?ASHFORD Some of it has to do with how uncomfortable people are with sex. People can’t handle not making a joke about it.PAULSON I wonder if it’s what we’re unwilling to look at in ourselves, in terms of this hatred toward Monica. I would have gone into that back room [Bill Clinton’s Oval Office study, where he and Lewinsky engaged in sexual activity], without question.MURPHY I would have done it, too.PAULSON It’s just the whole patriarchal story of accepting his desire, and it being celebrated and understood. And she’s really punished for giving in to her own desire. There is something about vilifying that when it comes from a woman.BEANIE FELDSTEIN To Monica’s credit, even in the Barbara Walters interview, she doesn’t shy away. She doesn’t apologize. She just states the fact. She holds her ground in saying it was mutual. Now we obviously see there was a deep imbalance of power and a very nuanced situation. But why should she be shamed for that, when he, the President of the United States, was never shamed for that? I’m getting a little emotional because I love her so much — I really care about her as a character and as a person. I think it’s just devastating. And it doesn’t get less devastating the more we talk about it. I hope that the show undoes some of the pain.We don’t see the sex that the Starr Report details. We do see the famous thong reveal —SIMPSON That thong moment [when Lewinsky lifted her jacket so that President Clinton could see the waistband of her underwear] wasn’t in the original script. Monica asked for us to put it in.BURGESS She said, “Everyone knows I did this. And I know you’re trying to protect me, but it needs to be in the show.”But why don’t you show the sex?MURPHY The behavior that led to the act was more important than the act. We spent a lot of time asking these questions, and also asking Monica, “What do you think and what do you want?”What did she want? What was her involvement in the show?MURPHY We would go through every page of a script. Sometimes she would have a lot of comments, sometimes nothing. I found the process fascinating and necessary. She never wanted the easy choice. She always wanted it more complicated, more nuanced.The Starr Report led the House of Representatives to impeach President Clinton, here in 1998 with Hillary Clinton, but the Senate found him not guilty.Win McNamee/ReutersWhat did you want to make clear about her relationship with Bill Clinton?FELDSTEIN Monica, at that moment, was a bundle of contradictions. She was naïve yet savvy, sensual yet innocent. That’s been the wonderful struggle, playing both sides. Like any 22-year-old, she thought she knew the world. She had to learn the world. This was her learning.SIMPSON The Hillary point of view is complicated, too.BURGESS It was and still is. There’s a mystery at the center of that story, which is what happens when [Bill and Hillary Clinton] are alone together in a room. There’s no Tripp tape for that.EDIE FALCO It is something that everybody I know has wondered about: What the hell was that like, when she found out? How did this woman make sense of any of this? There was nothing she could do that was right — her glasses, her last name, the way she talked.You’re playing women whom viewers think they know. How important was it to perfect their speech, gait, gestures?FELDSTEIN Her emotionality mattered to me more than her physicality or her voice. I just tried to focus on how she was feeling and what was motivating her, and really tune out everything else. But it’s one thing to play a real human being, and it’s another thing to play a real human being whom you text and call. I want her to watch it and feel validated.FALCO Hillary is a woman who has been imitated on late-night talk shows and on “Saturday Night Live” by pretty much every cast member. So that was troubling to me. I was not interested in being another interpretation. And over the years, she changed a lot — her accent, the way she walked, the way she presented herself — as she evolved as a person in public life. I thought, this whole story is about getting at who this woman is. So for me, it was more about an inner life.PAULSON I worked with a movement teacher, who was with me every day, to try to create a different physical shape than I have, in terms of my posture. It was helpful to look in the mirror and not see myself. I still consider what [Tripp] did to be beyond morally questionable. I’m not trying to humanize her; I’m just trying to be her in the situation and in the circumstances. I connect to a certain kind of internal rage that she has that I have a really easy time dipping into.FELDSTEIN I call it the Tripp dip.ASHFORD For Paula, it’s always about trying to please her husband, trying to please somebody else. It’s part of why she talks so high; it’s part of why she makes herself so small. There’s a real childlike quality. I also worked with a movement coach.MURPHY I want a movement coach.You had so much archival material to draw from — the recordings, the congressional records, the media response. The Starr Report alone runs to more than 112,000 words. How did you decide what to include?BURGESS It’s character first. In the ’90s, Linda and Monica were afterthoughts in the ways this was perceived and reported. They were these idiots who talked about Macy’s on the phone. It was the lawyers and the men who mattered.SIMPSON The way this story has traditionally been told is the story of these great powerful men facing off: Bill Clinton versus Ken Starr, Newt Gingrich versus Bill Clinton. Then off to the side are these nutty women. We decided, from the beginning, we’re going to start with these women.FELDSTEIN These characters, in different ways, have never been given full humanity. What the show does, it prioritizes the humanity over the plot. More