Sarah Paulson has new take on nurse in ‘Ratched’

Sarah Paulson easily diagnosed the key to nurse Mildred Ratched. This was before she even uttered a line in the new hit Netflix series courtesy of her friend Ryan Murphy.

“I was looking to get in there beyond ‘She is just so cr-cr-crazzzyyyy,’” says Paulson, 45, in a Zoom interview from her Los Angeles home. “What if she just did bad things because she believed that as a woman her rights were limited by an era when she had no power?”

If that’s how she wants to explain one of fiction’s most iconic villains, so be it. Paulson dons much more than just the white uniform for Netflix’s “Ratched,” where she brings us a Mildred who is “just misunderstood,” Paulson insists.

The character is based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which was brought to the big screen by Milos Forman in 1975 with Oscar-winning turns by Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher.

The newest adaptation stars Paulson as a younger version of the nurse, who in 1947 arrives in Northern California and is hired by a psychiatric hospital.

“Each episode shows a darker bedside manner,” says the actress known for her work with Murphy in the FX anthology series “American Horror Story” and “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” She won an Emmy for her portrayal of Marcia Clark in the latter.

Review-Journal: How are you surviving the pandemic? Is every day Sunday?

Sarah Paulson: Well, I’ve been really lucky to work so much in the last few years. In fact, I was just about two weeks shy of shooting another “American Crime Story” when COVID hit. I’m going to play Linda Tripp, so I was immersed in working with a dialogue coach when everything stopped. I went home, where I found that it’s an unnerving thing for me not to be working. I don’t really know what to do with myself. I did learn how to use all of my electric devices, which was good. The bad part is I found out that during one day I did have 11 hours of screen time. I’m into the app Marco Polo. Since then, I have cut it way down.

What kind of pressure was it to reinvent Nurse Ratched?

Mildred Ratched is in the top five villains of all time by the American Film Institute. No pressure there!

Is it true that you see her as an antihero of sorts? Is she Don Draper in a nurse’s uniform?

She’s not just a villain in my eyes, but someone with no recourse. She has to toe the line, and the ramifications and consequences were devastating to many men and women in her care. It wouldn’t have been interesting to me to explore the parts of Mildred Ratched that aren’t porous. She’s quite porous here.

How is this Nurse Ratched different from the one in the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”

In the movie, she’s calcified. There is a hardness to her. Nothing ekes out. I remember when I first saw the movie thinking that she was absolutely a villain and evil. And then I rewatched it before we started. I thought, you know this is a woman who is a victim of a patriarchal infrastructure in this hospital, and could it be considered that she didn’t have any choice about whether or not she can access her heart in her way. Can she bring her femininity and her womanhood to the job?

You’re also a producer of “Ratched.” Was it great to have a power role?

I’ve worked with Ryan Murphy a couple of times, but this was a different one for me because he was very, very interested in empowering me in a way that I had never experienced before. I was so terrified.

Why did this make you nervous?

I had to confront my hesitation: Am I capable? Am I ready? Do I want it? What does it mean if I do? Is that ambition? That said, Ryan has always been my greatest champion. It is not without its complications. Any real relationship will give you that. He gave me a lot of power, but that’s not all of it. He could have been, “Do what you want.” That wouldn’t have been good for anyone. He would send me cuts and I’d write pages and emails. He said, “You get to watch them before I get my first look at them and break them down first.” It was interesting to think beyond my own narrow view of acting. Once again, Ryan was responsible for giving me the thing I had not experienced.

You had an incident while shooting “Ratched” in downtown L.A. at a bar. Suddenly, as a cast and crew, you were informed that an active shooter situation was nearby. What happened next?

We were all forced to stay in this bar where we were shooting. There was an active shooter and we were all together and everybody was checking on each other every five minutes. As horrible as it was, I did go to the bar and Vincent D’Onofrio made a delicious group of drinks for people. There are these horrible moments, yet there’s this real family that I for one really love about doing things like this.

What are you looking forward to when the coronavirus crisis is over?

I’m looking forward to going back to work full stop. I want it to be safe before that happens. I would like the world to have some sort of massive rectifying of the way this has all been handled, and have some forward motion in terms of coming up with something to help us deal with this (COVID-19). I think I am going back to work soon, which makes me happy.