Long before dominating red carpets, Sarah Paulson staged what her mother genuinely mistook for a bathroom crime scene. Reflecting on an early hair-dye experiment gone horribly wrong, the actress revealed how a messy teenage mishap quickly spiraled into panic
Sarah Paulson’s Black Hair Dye Mishap Gone Horribly Wrong
Paulson was at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting “Closing Night,” Cody Fern’s directorial debut. Recalling her childhood in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she revealed that she once dyed her hair black at home, and the cleanup effort did not go well.
“I remember my mother came home and thought there had something horrible had happened in the bathroom because there was just like black hair dye splattered like all over the wall.”
The actress said the towels were ruined and her mother’s reaction escalated fast once she clocked what had actually happened.
“She just came out, what is happening, and then she looked at me and just lost her mind. So she was like, your beautiful hair, why did you do it? And I was like, because I’m an actress.”
Paulson didn’t stop there. She explained the dye job wasn’t really about acting at all, but about wanting to look like the friends she grew up around.
“I had a lot of fancy, fun, cool friends with cool names and cool parents and cool apartments, and I didn’t have any of that. And they had like dark hair and things. And so I decided to dye my hair black cuz I thought that would make me some other person.”
The plan didn’t work the way teenage Paulson hoped.
“And guess what? It didn’t. I was still me but just with black hair. And it was bad.”
Paulson stars alongside Dianne Wiest in “Closing Night,” playing a hardened movie star who reunites with her estranged family on the opening night of her Broadway play. Fern, her former “American Horror Story” Season 8 co-star, wrote the role specifically for her before stepping behind the camera to direct it. The film premiered as part of TIFF’s 2026 lineup.
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