Jessica Lange Talks Ryan Murphy’s "American Horror Story"

I might be a gay man, but I’m still able to appreciate a good pair of legs on a woman. And by god if at 62 years old Jessica Lange still doesn’t have the sexy gams of a girl half her age.

She sat on stage following FX’s American Horror Story panel at the TCAs in a knee-length black dress, matching heels, and that familiar dazzling smile. Surrounding her, a small but eager group of TV journalists practically tripped over each other to get a word in edgewise. 90 percent of which, I might add, had nothing at all to do with the show she was there to promote.

Hey, it’s difficult to stay on topic when you’re dealing with a legend.

“I have a certain affinity [for] playing Southern women,” said Lange, who gives off a genteel if somewhat intimidating aura. “I mean, most of the characters I’ve played over the years are Southern.”

So who’s been her favorite so far?

“Always Blanche,” she answered with a smile, referring to A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche Dubois, whom she played both on Broadway and later in a made-for-TV film. “Blanche is always my favorite, just because…I mean, the way [Tennessee] Williams wrote her…I realized that the language just takes you. You know? It was like getting on a train and just like moving through the next three hours.”

The Southern woman she’s playing this time around is Constance, a mysterious, intrusive neighbor who lives next door to the Harmon family – Ben (Dylan McDermott), his wife Vivien (Connie Britton), and their daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga).

Cast and crew of American Horror Story at last month's TCA

They’ve recently relocated from the East Coast and settled in a spooky Victorian with a dark past – a past that Constance and her Down syndrome daughter Adelaide (Jamie Brewer) seem to know a bit more about than they’re letting on. True to Lange’s extensive history of playing damaged, slightly oddball characters, Constance proves an unsettling presence.

“But I can’t think of it in those terms, you know?” she said of the woman’s more eccentric qualities. “I just have to ground it in something very real. So…I mean if it comes off that way, it does. But yeah, I can’t think in those terms as an actor.”

This being her first role in an out-and-out horror project (unless you could her film debut in the 1976 remake of King Kong), I asked Lange if she’d previously been a fan of the genre. She admitted that she wasn’t.

“You know, it’s not a genre that I’ve been drawn to too much over the years,” she said. “Although when they talk about the classic ones like Don’t Look Now, or Rosemary’s Baby, I mean, they’re brilliant films. So I am [a] fan of that kind of [horror] film.”

One major element that attracted Lange to the project was the fact that instead of the 22-episode commitment typically required for a show on a broadcast network, American Horror Story only necessitated a 13-episode obligation.

“That was huge for me!” she said. “I wasn’t about to commit to, you know, six months. It was cable, rather than network. …I’ve been offered network [shows] before, and determined not to do it, just because I can’t make that kind of time commitment.”

Of course, I couldn’t let Lange go without asking about her performance in Grey Gardens, the 2009 HBO film for which she won an Emmy starring as “Big Edie” (a.k.a. Edith Ewing Bouvier), the reclusive aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy. Particularly given that the original 1975 documentary on which the film was based has such a passionate (and largely gay) cult following, I wondered how much pressure she felt to get all the details right.

Lange (right) with Drew Barrymore in Grey Gardens

“Yes it does [have a huge gay following], yeah,” she said. “Because it is such an iconic film, and they’re such iconic characters…when we were doing it, we were very specific, especially about certain moments. I know Drew [Barrymore, playing ‘Little Edie’] felt the same way I did, that we had to get [everything] precisely right, because the fanbase of Grey Gardens, of the ‘Edies’, would know immediately if it was off in the slightest.

“So we worked very hard. I mean, I remember when I was doing the ‘Tea for Two’ [song], I worked really, really hard in getting it absolutely perfect, beat for beat what Big Edie did. And it was a great payoff, because when we saw it with the audience in New York at the premiere, and in L.A., it was kind of an explosion of a response.”

American Horror Story premieres Wednesday, October 5^th at 10 PM on FX.