American Horror Story season 13 will feature an all-star array of actors from the show’s previous seasons, bringing back their fan-favorite characters. Neither of these elements are exactly new to the anthology series; creator Ryan Murphy loves to work with the same performers across different projects, and even though American Horror Story is ostensibly an anthology, its storylines often find ways to engineer crossovers. But from the sound of it, season 13 will take that to the extreme, with returning faces like Sarah Paulson playing multiple characters fans will recognize from past seasons.
And while a new interview with Murphy in Vogue confirms Paulson will play six of her former characters in season 13 (Jessica Lange is playing four, while Evan Peters has five), we still don’t yet know exactly who. Cordelia Goode from Coven and Apocalypse will surely have a prominent role. But what about Paulson’s character—or rather, dual characters—from Murphy’s personal favorite American Horror Story season?
“Whenever I tell Jessica or Sarah or Evan [which AHS season is my favorite], they’re like, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’” Murphy told Vogue. “My favorite season is Roanoke, which is a lot of people’s least favorite season. I liked the structure and the dramaturgy of it. It was challenging for me.”
Roanoke, which aired in 2016, is styled as both a documentary filled with dramatic reenactments about an allegedly haunted house, titled My Roanoke Nightmare, and a found-footage look at the doomed attempt to make a sequel after the original documentary becomes a smash hit. Doomed, of course, because there are indeed ghosts galore creeping around the property, and grisly murders ensue.
Paulson, for one, has gone on record as saying Roanoke is her least favorite season. When filming began, she was just coming off her role as prosecutor Marcia Clark in the Murphy-produced American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, and AHS wasn’t where she wanted to go next.
“I just don’t care about this season at all. I know people will get mad at me for saying it,” she explained in a 2021 interview. “To me, this was post-having played Marcia [Clark]. It was what I went to do right after finishing Marcia, and I was so underwhelmed by the whole experience. Because I felt like I had entered into a new place inside of myself in terms of what I thought possible, in terms of what I might be willing to see if I [could] do. I felt really kind of trapped by my responsibility and my contractual obligation to do American Horror Story. As much as it’s my home, and I’ve loved it always, it was the first time I felt like I wish I could have gone to Ryan and said, ‘Please let me sit this one out.’”
So if Paulson shows up in the new American Horror Story season as the reenactment version of Shelby yelling “Matt” 500 times, we’ll know Murphy is having the last laugh.
American Horror Story season 13 arrives September 24 on FX and Hulu.
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