When Clive Owen was asked to play Bill Clinton in Impeachment: American Crime Story, the Oscar-nominated actor wasn’t initially interested as much as he was confused.
“To be honest with you, I said to them, why are you coming to me?” says Owen, recalling his first conversation with executive producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Simpson. “One: I’m English. And two: I don’t really look like him.”
In an e-mail to Vanity Fair, Simpson explains their rationale behind what he calls “one of the biggest casting challenges of the show. Clinton is one of the most recognized men in the world, and has a distinct look and voice. He is famous for his intelligence and charisma. We needed to find someone who could evoke that, without just doing an imitation. . .Clive has this great physicality—tall with big hands and an intense presence. You feel it when he walks into a room. His eyes are alive, like Clinton’s, and you also see immense depth behind them. With Clive you sense that there are layers and layers behind whatever he says or does in a scene.”
After that explanation, Murphy and Simpson laid out their vision for the third iteration of American Crime Story—an ambitious 10-episode reimagining of the ’90s saga that led to the 42nd president’s impeachment, but from a modern, more enlightened perspective. Impeachment would feature Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford), Monica Lewinsky (Beanie Feldstein), and Linda Tripp’s (Sarah Paulson) stories and, in particular, spotlight the way these women were maligned by the media. Clinton would be more of a supporting character in this sprawling ensemble, and Murphy needed an actor who could telegraph complex emotions in crucial scenes from beneath the measured composure and control of a political figure.
“He was very clear that they were going to take a very particular look at the way the women were treated,” says Owen. “In effect, it’s a period piece because it was so long ago. Looking at it from a modern perspective—and actually playing out the story and seeing how everybody was treated—everybody would say that Monica Lewinsky was treated pretty appallingly.”
After that first call with Murphy and Simpson, Owen mulled over the offer—researching Clinton and letting the idea of playing the (still living) former president grow on him. “I started to get excited by the challenge of it because it felt like a leap. It didn’t feel like something that somebody would say, ‘Oh, well that makes sense.’” And there was another challenge—one that Owen hadn’t encountered in his three-decade career collaborating with the likes of Robert Altman (Gosford Park), Mike Nichols (Closer), Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men), and, more recently, Steven Soderbergh in the early-20th-century medical drama The Knick.
As Clinton, Owen would have to reenact some of Clinton’s most memorable public moments from the scandal—including the 1998 press conference during which Clinton responded to the Lewinsky allegations by pleading, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
“The idea of recreating the real footage or archival footage really was the hook for me,” says Owen. “There’s something about a challenge that always excites me when it that feels dangerous.”
Owen was rich in danger on his last recurring TV gig, The Knick, where he played the arrogant, drug-addicted surgeon Dr. John Thackery. The series concluded with Thackery elbow-deep in his own innards, performing a risky surgery on himself without general anesthesia. With Impeachment, the danger was in reconstructing those indelible moments, which any viewer could easily fact-check with a few clicks on YouTube.
“It’s nerve-racking because they are moments that everybody knows,” says Owen. “You say, ‘Okay, I’ve got to get as close to that [footage] as possible and that includes how I sound, the rhythm, the feeling, and energy of it.’ It’s very clear. It’s not about an interpretation where you can make the wrong choice.”
Says Simpson, “We knew about his reputation for focus and preparation, but we weren’t prepared for the amount of work he put into the role. He studied Clinton, picking up every nuance of speech, every tick of his delivery. He would ask for scripts months in advance to make sure the accent was right, the cadence spot on. And then he would show up and be at once completely natural while also fully prepared. He did what we hoped he would—he took this real person and made him his own.”
An especially difficult scene to recreate was Clinton’s 1998 deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Owen didn’t just have seven pages of dialogue to memorize—he had speech patterns, inflections, and minor movements to absorb. But Owen was so invested that he says he rebuffed offers to break up the deposition and shoot it in separate shots, insisting that the writers use Clinton’s actual dialogue whenever possible.
“It felt more interesting and satisfying than doing sort of an approximation of what went on in real life,” says Owen. “I was very particular about making sure that if we could use what was actually said, that was always better…even if the script was just veering slightly from what he actually said.”
He worked closely with dialect coach Michael Buster (12 Years a Slave) to develop Clinton’s Arkansas drawl and speech pattern with eerie precision—matching the ways that Clinton spoke in public, and separately, speaking with more of a Southern drawl as Clinton in private. “Everyone thinks of him as having that gravelly voice—and you feel that that must be some kind of strain, because his voice is catching,” says Owen. “But actually that’s not the case. His voice is actually quite free. It’s just where his voice sits and the way his voice vibrates.”
As for Clinton’s physicality, the actor says “it took a number of goes” to figure out the best way to transform his face. “Unfortunately, I haven’t got the same shaped face as him at all, really,” says Owen, explaining that the team eventually settled on using a prosthetic forehead and nose which, with makeup, took about two hours to apply each day. “I didn’t want to be buried in prosthetics because I find that super distracting. So we were able to find something that was sort of in the middle that was a gesture of him, and not be totally drowned and hidden behind a sort of false face.”
In addition to listening constantly to Clinton’s voice in the prosthetics chair, the actor also studied Clinton’s physicality.
“I think he’s probably a bit heavier than me, but we’re exactly the same height,” says Owen. “He was very contained. He wasn’t very frantic in his physicality, really…. Very simple. He never expressed things too sharply through his body.”
Owen says he did not attempt to reach out to Clinton, or anyone who knew him. Asked whether he felt a responsibility to Clinton in portraying the former president onscreen, the actor answers carefully. “I felt like the whole thing has been done as sensitively as it can. I don’t know what he’ll think about it. I just played the part as best I could and that was what I felt my job was, really.”
When I ask about Owen’s perspective on the Clinton-Lewinsky saga after playing the president, the actor also demurs—hoping that audiences will come to their own conclusions after they see the series, premiering on FX September 7.
“The thing that Ryan Murphy does really well on these shows is that he attacks a big story like this from so many angles,” says Owen. “He lets each perspective fully breathe and go: Now we’re looking at it from there. Now we’re looking at it from there. That’s what’s gripping—you’re looking at these events in so many different ways. Ultimately, people will watch the whole thing and have their thoughts, but it’s not been predetermined for you. It’s not been heavily laid down that this is what you should think.”
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