Sarah Paulson has tackled some of television’s most harrowing psychological roles, but the climax of Cody Fern’s feature directorial debut, Closing Night, required an emotional leap that left her completely without a script.
Sarah Paulson Channeled Shirley MacLaine When the Script Had No Answers
The dramatic thriller follows an acclaimed Broadway actress who invites her estranged family to opening night after three decades apart, only for long-buried secrets and literal bodies to surface. Speaking at the Collider Media Studio alongside Fern, Paulson admitted that when production reached the film’s devastating, final-scene climax, she had zero tactical roadmap for how to execute it.
Instead of overthinking the performance, Paulson channeled cinema legend Shirley MacLaine’s famous breakdown scene in Terms of Endearment.
“The only thing that’s flashing in my mind right now is what Shirley MacLaine talked about at the end of Terms of Endearment when Debra Winger passes away,” Paulson explained. “She said she didn’t have a plan… and so she just started to breathe. The reason I bring that up is that I didn’t have a plan about what to do in this particular scene that you’re referring to. The idea of kind of standing at a cliff’s edge and just opening your arms and diving is sort of what it felt like.”
The unscripted emotional plunge was made possible by the deep artistic trust between Paulson and Fern, who previously shared the screen on American Horror Story: Apocalypse. Rather than micromanaging the actors or dictating strict blocking, Fern chose to step back and let the unscripted intensity unfold naturally in real time.
“It was a trust fall, too,” Paulson said. “There was like, ‘I don’t know.’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know, either. But why don’t you hop on in there and go do it.’ And so, I did.”
That willingness to surrender total control transformed the film’s final moments into a raw, unpredictable showcase of acting prowess. By leaning into sheer instinct and creative vulnerability, Paulson delivered a festival standout performance that cements her and Fern’s collaborative shorthand as a force on both sides of the camera.
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