How AHS Freak Show Filmed Sarah Paulson’s Scenes As Bette & Dot

How AHS: Freak Show Filmed Sarah Paulson’s Scenes As Bette & Dot

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Sarah Paulson tackled the roles of Bette and Dot on AHS: Freak Show without the assistance of another performer. Here’s how the show pulled it off.

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How AHS Freak Show Filmed Sarah Paulson’s Scenes As Bette & Dot

As one of Ryan Murphy’s prized stars, Sarah Paulson has been given a bounty of interesting and challenging characters to play over American Horror Story’s nearly ten-year run. Arguably, her most notable role on the show to date was when she played conjoined twins Bette and Dot on Murphy’s long-running hit horror anthology series.

Paulson’s Bette and Dot were two of the main characters in season four of American Horror Story, titled Freak Show. The sisters were recruited to join the ranks of the “freaks” in the local circus. Their vastly different personalities and motives cause them to constantly clash through out the season.

Playing one complicated character is often plenty of work for a performer. Paulson, however, had to maintain the challenge of playing two difficult characters simultaneously. The process of stitching her performances as Bette and Dot together to exist in the same scenes was anything but simple.

Sarah Paulson’s Scenes As Bette & Dot Were Very Complicated

Whenever a set of conjoined twins are featured on screen, each twin is typically played by a different performer. Murphy made the very conscious choice to have Paulson play each sister in order to present her with a different acting challenge. Of course, the two-for-one role did turn out to be quite the challenge for Paulson and many others as well. Every scene Paulson filmed for AHS: Freak Show ended up taking between 12-15 hours to film. The first step in the process was creating two molds of Paulson’s head — one to represent Bette and one to represent Dot. She needed to wear custom dresses to accommodate sporting two heads at once. When she was playing one twin, she’d be wearing the other sister’s mold on her shoulder. In addition to that, she would wear an ear piece that would feed her the opposite twin’s lines so she could react accordingly.

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Just as she didn’t want another actress playing one of the twins, Paulson didn’t want another performer to read her dialogue off-camera for her. Paulson pre-recorded all of Bette and Dot’s respective dialogue so she could play one twin’s lines in her ear while she was performing as the other. She was firmly planted in the role of each sister, and adopted specific tones, attitudes, backstories, and facial expressions for each. Part of the reason for the long hours required to film all of Paulson’s scenes was her need to take all separate aspects of Bette and Dot and consistently keep up with them for every close-up, medium shot, and master recording of Dot and Bette.

The time and effort paid off. Murphy went on to praise Paulson’s performance as perhaps the best thing he’s ever seen her do — and Paulson has a lot of great roles under her belt. After taking a brief break from American Horror Story in season nine, Paulson’s return to the series has been announced for season ten. As the show currently has no end in sight, fans will likely be eager to see if she tops her meticulous performance as Bette and Dot in upcoming seasons of the show.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/american-horror-story-freak-show-bette-dot-scenes-filmed/

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