‘American Horror Story’s Lily Rabe Explains How ‘AHS’ “Broke the Mold”

When it comes to the twisted world of American Horror Story, few actors understand the assignment better than Lily Rabe. Over the series’ 10 seasons we’ve seen Rabe embody everything from caustic grieving mothers and starry-eyed witches to possessed nuns and real-life murderers. If Rabe is on screen, you know she’s about to give a killer performance. That’s especially true of Rabe’s deeply empathetic turn as Doris Garner in Red Tide.

Doris started out this season as the lone smart soul walking into horror movie hell. The second she realized that Provincetown was overrun with vampiric copycats, she wanted to run. Instead, she was traumatized, gaslight, and ultimately abandoned by the very husband and daughter she gave everything to protect. Following Doris’ heartbreaking fate in “Gaslight”, Rabe spoke to Decider about what it was like to be transformed into a pale person and which AHS seasons should receive the crossover treatment.

Decider: You’ve been in American Horror Story since the beginning, and now we’re in the 10-year anniversary. How have you seen the show evolve?

Lily Rabe: Getting to be a part of something for 10 years, there’s no other job I’ve ever been a part of for a decade. Ryan [Murphy] sort of broke the mold when he created the world of American Horror Story. It’s like this wild, wonderful hybrid of getting to do a limited series where you are telling these stories season to season, playing different parts, but then also there are these through lines that connect the seasons, that connect the stories. Also, just the fact that there is this repertory group of actors that get to keep coming back together and the crew and the directors, there is this feeling of family. And, of course, getting to welcome new people in all the time with open arms.

I’ve just not experienced anything else like that. The closest thing I can compare it to is sort of what it’s like to be a part of the New York theater community and get to come back and do play after play on the same stage with a lot of the same actors at the Delacorte (Theater) or something. It’s very unique in its structure, not only in the world-building that he does for the show and season to season, but in the sort of world that he has built for the people who are part of the show.

Getting into Red Tide, in Episode 5 we got to see Doris turn into one of the pale people. What was the prosthetics and the makeup like for that?

Nothing, I’m not wearing anything. What are you talking about? [laughs]

It was a lot. I do have a lot of hair. I don’t wear extensions or anything like that, so we sort of loved having all my hair for Doris, you know, Doris Episodes 1 through 4.5. How they got it all under a bald cap was definitely a feat. But we had done it once before on the show. We actually had to do it in Season 3, so it wasn’t our first visit to the bald cap on Horror Story.

There was a bald cap, of course, and all sorts of makeup. I think that there are also phases for Doris even before she has taken the pill. That’s one of the things that was so wonderful about — not only the arc of Doris, but the arc of Doris in this one and only episode alone — was that she starts out giving brith and then wakes up in her bed, and she is being gaslit. She has the people she loves and trusts telling her that her sense of reality, what she knows is true, is being completely manipulated and questioned so that she is losing her sense of reality. She is being driven to some other kind of sanity, or lack thereof, by this psychological torture. Even then, I had these very bloody cuticles that were partially self-inflicted shooting the episode. But then we were leaning into it, and Eryn Krueger (Makeup Department Head) was running in and adding more blood to my cuticles as the episode went on.  She’s also recovering from giving birth. There is an IV drip that is being put in her arm that is not from the doctor, so that is happening.

What I think is so interesting is, of course when she becomes the pale person — and we see in that scene — that even her ability to recognize (Finn Wittrock’s Harry), to recognize any kind of reality, what is real life. He gets through for a second. When she’s on the floor in the bathroom, everything is getting further and further away from her. Her ability to understand what he is saying, who she is, where she is, anything human is going away. One of the things I find so beautifully done is that is happening before she’s taken the pill. Before she’s becoming a pale person, her sense of reality and her ability to process what’s happening is getting further and further and further and further away from her, being taken from her, being manipulated away from her long before she’s swallowed the pill.

Doris plays into one of two types of characters you typically portray in American Horror Story. Your characters are typically either very sweet victims like Doris or crazier, more deranged, like dark side of Sister Mary Eunice in Asylum and Lavinia Richter in 1984. Which of these two extremes do you like to play with more?

Well, I would never want to choose one. What I would say is what I’ve loved so much is very often I’ve gotten to do both in one character. Sister Mary Eunice starts out as the innocent and ends up as the devil. And certainly with Doris… they’re so different. Doris really truly was unlike anyone I’ve played on the show. But that’s part of what I’ve loved so much is the duality of it. You often get to play such extremes in one journey of one person.

If there was another crossover season like what happened with Apocalypse, which seasons would you want to come back?

I would either say Asylum and Coven, or Asylum and Red Tide... I think that the themes of Asylum and the themes of Red Tide and that “real” question, those questions of sanity and of psychological torture. To me, those are always, if I had to choose, probably the winners in terms of what I find the absolute most compelling. But I also really love witches.

New episodes of American Horror Story: Double Feature premiere on FX Wednesdays at 10/9c p.m. Episodes premiere on FX on Hulu the following Thursday.

Where to stream American Horror Story: Double Feature