The Oscar-winning actress talks to BuzzFeed about her final season of American Horror Story , the “happy accident” that led to her becoming an author, and the characters she just couldn’t shake.
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Jessica Lange is halfway into filming Season 3 of American Horror Story and though she's relishing in her character Fiona Goode's sleek stilettos, there is an end in sight. "I'll do one more season," the actress says of the FX franchise that's added an Emmy and a Golden Globe to add to her collection, which already included two Oscars. Just a couple of weeks ago, American Horror Story co-creator Ryan Murphy said, "Every year, she says, 'OK, that's my last one.'" But after Season 4, Lange will say goodbye to the series for good. "That'll be it," she tells BuzzFeed, offering one of her signature confident grins.
Fans will want to cherish Lange's penultimate performance in American Horror Story: Coven while they can. The actress is currently playing Fiona Goode, the Supreme, aka the strongest witch in each generation who has multiple powers (as opposed to simply being a human Voodoo doll, like Horror Story newcomer Gabourey Sidibe's Queenie, or screwing men to death like poor Zoe, played by Season 1's Taissa Farmiga). The season opened with Fiona returning to Miss Robichaux's Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, where her daughter Cordelia (Horror Story veteran Sarah Paulson) is teaching young witches Queenie, Zoe, clairvoyant Nan (Jamie Brewer), and Madison (Emma Roberts), a former teen movie star who can move things with her mind.
Fiona's also facing off against two figures in New Orleans' history: voodoo queen Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) and 1830s high-society woman Madame LaLaurie (Kathy Bates), to whom Laveau gave an immortality potion and then buried alive...until Fiona dug her up, that is. All Fiona wants is what Madame LaLaurie has, minus the bound-by-chains-in-a-coffin-for-180-years thing.
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"The spine of the character is that thing of a wasted life," Lange says. "The idea that this woman has gone through life basically like a bulldozer, in the most selfish, self-centric fashion. Things just falling by the wayside. Now, she's at a moment in her life where she's confronted by all these things — her mortality; the fact that maybe she's alone and what did she discard on the way, like her daughter, that could bring something meaningful, but it's too late. That Portrait of Dorian Gray element fascinates me: What do you trade off for this idea of eternal youth and beauty and how much are you willing to sell for that? How much of your soul are you willing to give up?"
In the first couple of episodes of American Horror Story: Coven, Fiona throws out hilarious pop culture references (including Harry Potter and Ed Hardy) as quickly as she tosses people who annoy her against a wall. "I think Ryan was maybe even surprised by how fast and how dark it got last year," Lange notes of Season 2, American Horror Story: Asylum. "Of course, that's right up my alley. I like that a lot. But I think this season was a deliberate attempt to lighten it and add some humor. And I'm not against humor; my sensibilities just always tend toward the more tragic or the darker."
But it seems like Lange will soon get her wish.
"Oh, it's going to change really fast," she says with a laugh. "It's only going to get darker. We're going to move into territory that's much more interesting to play than these first few episodes."
