HIGH BAR

Jessica Lange: The Role I Love Most in My Career

The acting legend talks to Obsessed about her career-defining new performance, returning to “American Horror Story,” and more.

Jessica Lange has come to terms with a personal truth.

“I love playing characters who are teetering on the brink of madness,” she told me, letting out an almost involuntary laugh. “I do! I hate to say that about myself, but those are always the most interesting.”

Lange, unlike her screen avatars, was perfectly stable: warm, constantly grinning, and in an infectiously great mood when we spoke at the Virginia Film Festival, where she was honored with the Visionary Award for her culture-defining career of work. All of those mad characters.

Perhaps channeling people who are teetering on the brink of madness is what has helped her stay sane throughout her 50 years in a business that could be its own veritable asylum.

“It’s funny you say that because my daughter, when she was little, said to me one time, I think it was while I was playing Blanche DuBois on stage, ‘Mama, do you think that playing all these crazy ladies is gonna make you crazy?’ And I said, ‘No, I think it’s probably gonna keep me from going crazy.’”

The legendary actress—two-time Oscar winner, three-time Emmy champ, the accolades go on—is experiencing a bit of a “This Is Your Life, Jessica Lange” moment.

When we talked, she had just done a live on-stage retrospective interview chronicling her entire career, from her iconic King Kong debut to now. “Some things you like talking about it, and some things…probably less so…” she said, trailing off into a giggle.

“You have such strong feelings about certain pieces, and then, you know, regret about some pieces,” she added. “And some things you remember really well. Some things you don’t.” The giggling is back: “So there’s always that too.”

Lange is also in an unusual position for an actor. In two separate projects released this year, she revisited two of her career-defining roles.

She is on the awards trail promoting the film version of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, an adaptation of the seminal Eugene O’Neill play that she first starred in on the West End 26 years ago, again on Broadway in 2016—winning a Tony Award—and now, 10 years later, on screen. That means she’s been playing the tragic Mount Everest of a character Mary Tyrone across three decades of her life.

The new season of American Horror Story, the anthology series that gave Lange some of the most dynamic, if outrageous, roles of her career, was a crossover event that brought her back to the franchise for the first time since 2015—and had her play all four of her characters.

The current theme, then, of career revisitation? “That was not planned,” she said, smirking.

As for the significance of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night finally being released, however, Lange is unequivocal: “No part has ever meant more to me than Mary Tyrone, and I’ve played some wonderful characters, you know, in the last 50 years.”

That’s a pretty incredible statement from the actress who starred in Frances, Blue Sky, Tootsie, Grey Gardens, and A Streetcar Named Desire. “But this one is, for me, the most meaningful, the one I love more than anything that I’ve ever done.”

A Long Day’s Journey Into Night is widely considered one of the great American plays of the 20th century. Inspired by O’Neill’s own family, specifically his relationship with his mother, it takes place in a single day in the Tyrones’ seaside Connecticut cottage in the summer of 1912. The family’s deep-seated feelings of resentment, jealousy, and dreams unfulfilled combust as matriarch Mary unravels over her addiction, inciting a conflagration of brutal honesty.

“O’Neill was writing this about his mother from such a well of truth and regret and sorrow and pity and understanding that it feels inexhaustible to me. It really does,” Lange said. “It feels like of every part that I’ve played, this one is the truest. It is the deepest. I could play it from now and for the next 10 years and never feel like, ‘Okay, I’ve, I’ve done that character.’”

The role has clearly been a siren for Lange, who keeps returning to it and fought mightily for this film version to be made and released, against unlikely odds and amid a difficult production. She’s ruled the material timeless, its themes—particularly its handling of Mary’s addiction—as relevant now as when O’Neill wrote it. Tackling Mary at various stages of her life has been profound: Her performance has been different, and how Mary changes and affects her has been different, too.

Lange was 25 years younger when she first played Mary Tyrone.

“In 25 years, especially at this point in your life, there’s a lot more experience. There’s a lot more loss, a lot more sorrow, a lot more grieving,” the 77-year-old actress said. “Things tend to empty out at a certain point in life. I always think of that great Joan Didion quote where she says, ‘I believed life would be too full forever.’ And it’s not, and that’s what Mary is, of course, dealing with in this piece: the loss. What she’s given up, what’s been taken away. Age just lends itself to that. Life experience lends itself.”

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Even though, over the three incarnations of Long Day’s Journey, her life experience changed, Lange was struck by how much of Mary still rested inside her once film production began.

“I don’t want to get too goofy here, but some parts haunt you when you’re finished with them, and I can recall exactly which ones,” she said. “For instance, Frances, I felt her presence for a long time after shooting. Blanche DuBois, but then again, I played her on three different occasions too. That is another haunting presence. But nothing compares to Mary Tyrone.”

Not to be too cliché, but it’s been a long journey to get this film into theaters and in front of film festival audiences.

Filming began in Sept. 2022, with Ireland subbing in for the Connecticut coast. On the second day of shooting, however, production shut down. The financing fell through. In the weeks that followed, Lange and producers scrambled for funding, with the cast and much of the crew decamping to Dublin and waiting it out, refusing to give up hope that production would restart.

Once photography wrapped, a struggle to finance post-production ensued, and then to find distribution and, if they were being really greedy, a budget for advertising—all of which went on for the next four years.

“It’s been very difficult,” Lange said. “But I love the film so much, and I love the character so much. It’s so important to me that it be seen.”

That much is undeniable. Lange has been a fixture on the fall film festival circuit, doing all she can to promote the film and what will certainly, in my subjective opinion, go down as one of the finest performances of her career. It’s her belief that the film deserves to be seen. I’d add that it’s her work in it that especially deserves mainstream and awards attention.

One thing that hasn’t had any trouble gaining attention, however, is her turn in the new season of American Horror Story. Or, should I say, her turns, plural.

Season 13 is a mash-up of storylines and characters from the series’ buzziest outings, which means that Ryan Murphy’s troupe of AHS actors returned to reprise several of their past roles in the franchise. For Lange, that meant reviving four: Constance, the sinister fading Southern belle from Murder House; Sister Jude, the sadistic nun from Asylum; Fiona, the supreme witch in Coven; and Elsa, the villainous ringleader in Freak Show.

“That was great just to be able to reprise those four characters, because they were very baroque, bigger than life, you know, overblown and great to do,” she said.

Reuniting with the repertory cast after a decade away reminded Lange of the bond they share not just because they spent so much time on set together, but because they are the only people who know the singular experience of performing all the outlandish things the Ryan Murphy series would require them to do.

“What’s great about it is that everybody embraced it,” she said. “I mean, look at the characters Kathy Bates played. I mean, the Bearded Lady, Madame LaLaurie… Sarah Paulson played Siamese twins. I mean, it was wild. So you grow to love the actors because everybody’s just taking a shot.”

The mention of Sarah Paulson reminds me of the final thing I needed to bring up before Lange and parted ways. Stories are floating around about an apparent night in New Orleans during the filming of this AHS season that involved dancing late into the night. Did Lange really do that?

She started laughing again.

It started as, you know, a lovely dinner, a whole bunch of people,” she said. “I think by the end of the night, or early morning hours, there were only a few of us left straggling through the streets of New Orleans. I hadn’t done anything like that since my early days in Paris.”

It’s nice to do that once in a while, I ventured. “Yes,” she laughed. “As I learned, it is.”

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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