Everyone’s perspective on national and global events is colored by — among other things — their age, which is why it’s worth mentioning that Impeachment: American Crime Story showrunner Sarah Burgess was coming of age as America was consumed by the scandal surrounding President Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct, only learning as an adult why exactly it was that, in her words, the adults in her life “couldn’t talk about anything else for, like, a year.”
The third installment of the Emmy-winning anthology series focuses on the events leading up to Clinton’s (Clive Owen) impeachment as seen through the eyes of three women: Monica Lewinsky (Beanie Feldstein), the young woman who had “sexual relations” with that man, Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson), Monica’s supposed friend who betrayed her secret, and Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford), whose sexual harassment lawsuit against the President ultimately gave a cabal of anti-Clinton lawyers just the opportunity they were looking for.
In a one-on-one interview with Collider, Burgess shared how she approached depicting the key players of the series — especially Linda Tripp, who’s a central figure to the story, with Paulson undergoing a pretty extreme physical transformation to play the role. She also addresses what it meant to have the real Monica Lewinsky involved as an executive producer — and if the project would have been all that different without her.
Collider: So tell me a little bit about how you got brought onto the project initially.
SARAH BURGESS: So three years ago, in the middle of 2018, an FX executive mentioned to me there was interest in doing the third season of American Crime Story about the Clinton impeachment. And then Brad Simpson of Color Force, who I’d met once around my first play in New York, he emails me. And I actually was a bit weird and evasive about it for a while because I thought… “This was a massive story in the ’90s. Everyone knows the story.” It felt very overexposed in the ’90s, and I wasn’t sure I was the right person to tell the story that felt like it was about Ken Starr versus Clinton and about affairs at work. It just didn’t seem to be that I was the best fit for it.
As I read more… I read a few books. The first things I read, I think still made me feel that I knew what the story already was. As I read more, especially Death of American Virtue by Ken Gormley… And I think I listened, perhaps, to Leon Neyfakh’s Slow Burn, I realized that I could tell this story from the point of view of these [women]… Of Linda Tripp, a frustrated bureaucrat who feels invisible and unseen and has all this tangled anger and frustration and loss over the situation at the White House. And that really spoke to me.
I also am from the suburbs of D.C. And my parents were both retired Navy commanders who worked in the Pentagon. So I actually went to the Pentagon as a kid on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. My Take Your Daughter to Work Day was to go to my mom’s office with her in her uniform and maybe the Counterdrug Division in the Pentagon in the E-Ring. And I had always wanted to write about an office comedy/drama in the Pentagon, so I also was excited. When I found out Monica and Linda met, both frustrated to be jettisoned to the Pentagon… I love stories about things that have just gotten worse for people in that way. And hearing interviews with Linda Tripp… Monica’s voice I became familiar with watching her TED Talk and everything, but when I read interviews with Linda, her voice, the way she spoke, really grabbed me as sort of funny and interesting and, at times, self-important, as we all are self-important at times. And I realized the depth of this very complicated character to me. It was just fascinating. So fascinating. There is never going to be an explanation for what she did, but I was determined to orient myself in that point of view and to find it.
So by the end of 2018, I flew to L.A. and did a meeting with Brad and Nina at Color Force, and Nellie Reed, and we sort of talked about the themes, and then I was off writing the first three episodes, when I sort of knew I would start the story in Monica and Linda’s point of view. And Paula Jones.
What was the process like of making sure that Sarah Paulson fit the role of Linda Tripp?
BURGESS: For whatever reason, whenever I signed on, I think there had been the notion of the idea that Sarah would play that part. That was always the reality in my head, that Sarah would play this role. It’s funny, I remember as I was writing, I was so fixated on the real Linda Tripp, whose inner life, I went very far into. I think that, aside from Sarah, I’m like the world’s leading expert about Linda Tripp, aside also from Linda Tripp’s actual family.
But I always felt very excited to see what she would do with what I was writing. And then once we started shooting, the pandemic stopped everything for like a year. But once we started shooting, I basically met her as Linda Tripp. That was sort of my experience with her, if that makes sense. I just always felt… That was always something that I was really excited about and felt somehow, I think, felt certain would be… I don’t know how to articulate it, but I… It was always the case that she was going to play that role to me.
And then what she’s done with it, I think… What she’s done with this incredibly complicated character has found all of the dimensions of this in her life. So I see everything in Linda there. I see this sort of…funniness. Sometimes a self-importance. The desire to be seen. Sometimes the warmth and empathy, and then sometimes the cruelty. And the kind of actor who’s going to find everything that you’ve written and more in a really wonderful way.
In terms of talking about a character like this and the concept of humanizing Linda Tripp — one detail that I felt like was really interesting in this regard was the show puts a big emphasis on how she feels very self-conscious about her body and she’s always dieting, and that’s a big focus of her conversations with Monica. And I’m wondering how deliberate a choice that was.
BURGESS: It was a choice because it’s real, basically. So it’s weird. When you write from reality this much… I’ve listened to all of Linda Tripp’s tapes multiple times, like many hours of my life walking around New York or L.A. or wherever, listening to that. It’s just something that they talked about a lot. And so it’s in the story. It is the story. It was a connection point. It was a form of constraint and control that our culture places on women, this feeling that you’re never good enough and something is wrong with you. Something is wrong with how you look.
And I got deep into the 1990s food culture. I spent all night on a Tumblr once, which was like pictures of all these low-fat foods and these messages that people were taking in. But to answer your question, yes, there’s an authorial choice behind everything, but it would have been more of a choice to not include that, given how much it is discussed on the tapes and in the coverage at the time. And even in Monica’s story, her book with Andrew Morton, it is a major theme about Monica’s life and the messages she took in and how she felt about that. So I, of course, felt that I had to include it.
Was shifting back and forth in time always the approach you knew you wanted to go for? Were there ever discussions about taking a pretty strict chronological approach? The first two episodes do go back and forth a bit.
BURGESS: Yes, they do. I think that… This is something I thought about that a lot, actually. I think with [Episode 1], we do begin in the middle of a climactic and terrible moment. I think it was hard to… In my first draft, to be honest, it actually started with Linda Tripp waking up and making SlimFast. And I think, as I did revisions, it felt too hard to resist to not maybe orient us in how bad things are going to become.
And then of course, the show’s going to tell the story of Paula Jones alongside the story of Linda Tripp, and so that requires a certain amount of moving between those two stories and then we move forward in time, because Linda was deposited at the Pentagon. She didn’t meet Monica like the next week. So I think we come back to Linda at some point in [Episode 1], and she’s now been sitting there with her cubicle mate in this place that doesn’t inspire her as much, and that has weighed on her.
I really agonized over how to tell the story, chronological or not. What Monica was going through in 1996 and ’97, it felt like I could tell the story of her arrival in Washington through… Her recounting it to Linda felt like the way to have that information land effectively.
In terms of deciding what to portray and what not to portray, what was important for you about putting some emphasis on the events surrounding Vince Foster’s death, including full-on showing him driving out to the woods?
BURGESS: The simple answer is, it’s about Linda Tripp’s life. Linda treasured working in the White House, and then was moved into the counsel’s office in the Clinton administration and, I believe, really had revered and had a positive relationship with Vince Foster. There was so much coverage of that event, I felt that I wanted to write it as close to the research as possible. For an event there’s a lot of conspiracy theories about, and a lot of, I think, dishonesty about, it felt important to understand him as a human being and what he was… To depict not everything, but to depict someone who is really struggling and, based on all the accounts that I read, I felt it was important to depict that as opposed to allow something to happen entirely offstage, which is sort of where these sort of shadowy conspiracy theories arise, and to understand what Linda experienced that day to some degree.
But if you’re asking about showing him driving off alone, I felt… I don’t know. I felt connected to his pain in that moment. And I felt… I think there was some desire to tell the story. As it was so heavily documented, I felt that I then could depict what was so heavily covered and written about in the press and in books and things like that, if that makes sense.
In terms of the world of Clinton conspiracy theories, in doing your research what surprised you the most about the way people talked about the Clintons at that period in time?
BURGESS: I have some wings in my family that are not fans of the Clintons and some that are more politically aligned. I have a varied family background, and that was hard, and so I do… It’s not shocking to me that people would really despise the Clintons. Hillary said there’s a right-wing conspiracy, a vast right-wing conspiracy, on The Today Show. And to some degree, she was right. There was this somewhat elaborate system of lawyers who really wanted to make sure that this lawsuit could keep going. And it’s complicated because Paula Jones is entitled to sue and we’re not a monarchy. The President should be able to be held accountable.
That being said, the lengths that some of the partisan legal apparatus in Washington went to put Clinton in jeopardy surprised me. There are people who despise politicians of a certain party because of what they do or how they act. They just don’t like them. I was shocked in reading… Getting deep into Whitewater and reading the stories of the ’90s, I was shocked by some of the things people truly do believe about the Clintons that I found no basis for. There are stories about drug trafficking in Arkansas, and all these things that don’t conform with reality and it builds… Does it completely shock me? I guess no, because I’m now so used to this polarized moment politically, but I guess I’m just sort of saying “Yes, I did find it.”
I think writing through the point of view and taking the point of view of the Clintons which I’ve had to do at times… For their friend to die in 1995 and the way he died and then for these vicious theories and ideas to come out immediately is really awful. There’s no reason to conceal my own ability to empathize from them because of politicians. It’s awful. It was very extreme, the sort of theories that immediately came out and how… And the vitriol around that when something really sad had happened.
What ultimately struck me about watching the show was just how much, especially in the first six episodes, it’s just basically a story of manipulation, where everyone’s basically getting manipulated except for poor Monica. Do you feel like there’s, for lack of a better term, life lessons to be drawn out from this?
BURGESS: Hmm. My main intention was to present the handful of perspectives and for people to draw their own conclusions from them. I think the story’s a tragedy, and I think it just grabs you for multiple reasons. I think that we as a culture should feel implicated by what happened. And I think part of the idea in orienting us in Linda Tripp’s perspective, too, is I think there’s something very tragic about all the frustration and anger that she, carried. And loneliness, and how, instead of actually attacking the system that made her feel that way, she ends up burning a vulnerable young person and… Burning with a life lesson, in a positive spin, but that is how a tragedy happens. That’s the tragedy to me at the center of the story.
You’re talking to me on a day when I don’t know how it will be received and what people will take from it or won’t. I’m sure to some degree it will surprise me and… But those are some things that I’ve thought about. It’s not an inspiring story. But I think the fact that Monica has persisted through all that she’s had to deal with and has become what she has become today is incredibly inspiring. The late ’90s, though, are our project.
It’s impossible to know what the actual answer to the question is, but how do you feel the show would be different if Monica hadn’t been involved as producer?
BURGESS: I think that, even if Monica were not a producer, reading about what happened to her, the way she was taken apart by our culture, the way a second Monica was sort of created by our culture and the media, I think always, always, always, in writing the story, I would feel a moral imperative to present her as a full and complicated human being. To not sort of do that trauma again.
The reality is, the show is often in the perspective of Linda Tripp and Bill Clinton, two people who did, intentionally or not, blow up Monica’s life. And I think I did feel a lot of freedom to write in those points of view and to give those characters complexity and all that. And so I can’t truly answer it, as you said, but I don’t think that would be fundamentally different.
I think that Monica helped to contribute. It is true. It’s not just a line, that she did help to, I think, contribute texture to the show and also, more important than that, give me permission to take the brakes off sometimes in times where I might’ve been holding back a little bit. In a first draft, if she’s telling a sort of complicated and dark story from her past, I may have framed it in a way that’s a little bit simple, and she was allowing me to pursue greater complexity.
But yeah, as you say, I can’t totally answer the question. I just know I would never have wanted to do this if it felt unfair to Monica or felt that it was somehow depicting her in a way that she was depicted in the late ’90s. She was so young, and orienting and writing from that point of view, I think, would have led me on a path toward… If I just printed the facts of what happened, if people don’t know, it would have, I think, always made me… It’s someone who’s being manipulated and who we hopefully feel for. I think that always would have been the case.
New episodes of Impeachment: American Crime Story premiere Tuesdays at 10 PM ET on FX.
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