Three years ago, at a book-signing event for a friend in London, Beanie Feldstein was asked offhandedly which real-life person she most wanted to play. The actor, fresh off her breakout role in the Oscar-nominated film Lady Bird, had never considered the possibility—so she blurted out the first name that popped into her head: “Maybe I could play Monica Lewinsky.”
Feldstein was a toddler when the former White House intern began her doomed affair with then president Bill Clinton. And Feldstein was 5 when Lewinsky, then in her earlier 20s, found herself at the center of a nightmare beyond imagination—when details of that intimate relationship were extracted in a hellish investigation and prosecution led by Ken Starr.
So back in London, Feldstein wasn’t thinking of Lewinsky in terms of dramatic potential—but in terms of the personal similarities she had heard about as a kid on the West Coast. “I know she also grew up Jewish in L.A., and did theater, and that was kind of my basic understanding of her,” says Feldstein.
Feldstein forgot about the exchange until six months later, when Ryan Murphy called with an offer for her to play Lewinsky in the third season of American Crime Story.
“I just couldn’t believe my ears,” says Feldstein, speaking to Vanity Fair on Zoom from a cozy corner in her home. “I don’t know enough about manifesting, but I believe that’s kind of how it works.” Feldstein didn’t think the offer could get any sweeter, but then Murphy revealed that Sarah Paulson would be playing Linda Tripp to Feldstein’s Lewinsky. “I was like, Well, okay, this is getting ridiculous…. I am literally Paulson’s number one fan.”
When Murphy announced that the new season of American Crime Story would feature Lewinsky as a character (and as a producer on the series), many assumed that the FX series would center on her relationship with Clinton. But that relationship wasn’t Murphy’s—or Feldstein’s—primary interest.
“[I] value my female friendships more than almost anything in this world,” says Feldstein, noting that she’s explored those bonds in previous projects like Lady Bird and Booksmart. “This one’s a little different, but it is still a friendship story—the central relationship of the show, I think, is Linda and Monica.”
When the show premieres September 7, Feldstein hopes that viewers better understand the nuances of the relationship—why Lewinsky and Tripp were drawn to each other, why Lewinsky trusted her, and why Tripp decided to secretly record Lewinsky’s private confessions.
“For me, playing Monica, it’s so clear why they became friends,” says Feldstein. “Because they both had been at the White House, which is this shiny, beautiful, warm work experience and they get tossed aside to the Pentagon, which, in their perspective, is icy and cold and barren. And they find each other in that space, where they both feel like they were tossed aside. That’s a very powerful starting place for two people to connect…. What happens when you, as a human being, are made to feel like you don’t matter, or you’re tossed aside? Or you’re made to feel insignificant? What can that feeling create in someone?”
“It really helps you understand how Linda did what she did. You are in Linda’s homelife just as much as you’re in Monica’s homelife,” explains the actor. “I think the fact that you get to peel back the curtain and go home and watch these women have those conversations that you might’ve heard on the tapes....Tapes are two-dimensional…. But when you watch Linda hit record, and then you watch Monica pick up the phone, and she’s peeling a cucumber and rattling off her day to Linda, there’s a humanity that comes about just by exploration of what was actually happening. And I think it’s really visceral, and it’s really affecting.”
Asked what Feldstein thinks of Tripp as a friend, after playing out this infamous saga from Lewinsky’s perspective, the actor chooses her words carefully.
“Obviously, I think Linda’s betrayal is one of the most singular, epic female-friendship betrayals of all time. There’s kind of nothing like it. But at the same time, Sarah Paulson’s performance and [executive producer] Sarah Burgess’s writing help you understand how she got there and what she thought she was doing.”
Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky in Impeachment: American Crime Story.
By Kurt Iswarienko/FX.This dark and tragically defining chapter of Lewinsky’s early life was emotionally difficult for Feldstein to depict. One episode centers on the FBI’s sting operation, during which Lewinsky learned that Tripp had double-crossed her by secretly recording their intimate conversations and turning them over to the law enforcement agency. “It was, for me as an actor, by far the most emotional place I’ve ever had to go to,” says Feldstein. “But because I knew that this was Monica’s real life, it was my job as her bodyguard of sorts—or as her portrayer—to make sure that that felt visceral, and that you could feel the pain that Monica was going through. I had to feel that pain in order for the audience to feel the pain…. I just really dug down deep and was like, ‘This is for Monica. We’ll go as many times as you need to go. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just do it again.’”
Filming Impeachment: American Crime Story was a meta-experience for Feldstein, who was acting out one of American history’s most infamous female friendships opposite Paulson—as the actors and producers grew close during production.
“I could talk about working with Sarah Paulson forever,” gushes Feldstein. “It’s literally my favorite topic of conversation. My partner, my family, are all like, ‘We get it. You love her.’ I’m like, ‘You don’t understand!’… I always tell her she’s so talented she shouldn’t be allowed to work anymore. Watching her create this woman was a master class in acting for me.”
Unlike Feldstein, Paulson’s transformation required a complete physical overhaul—including heavy prosthetics and a wig. The elaborate Tripp costume did not deter Feldstein. “I fully speak to her as Paulson in any version of the Linda getup. I’ve seen her in the middle of getting ready, when she’s getting out of being Linda, when she’s full tilt. It’s like I have X-ray vision, I can just see through it into Paulson. But I’m like, this is weird, I shouldn’t be this comfortable talking to you to you [like this].”
Feldstein’s preparation for the role was mostly research-based. She spent about nine months reading Andrew Morton’s authorized Lewinsky biography, listening to the tapes Tripp secretly recorded, poring over transcripts of Lewinsky’s depositions, and devouring a Dropbox of information sent over by American Crime Story’s research team before even meeting the real-life Lewinsky.
“Monica is really a bundle of contradiction,” says Feldstein. “She’s extremely naive and yet extremely savvy. She’s incredibly confident and yet remarkably insecure. So that push and pull inside of her was really what I was focused on. It wasn’t something that her and I talked so much about out loud.” When Feldstein finally met Lewinsky—both women are producers on Impeachment: American Crime Story—it wasn’t to pry more information from her, but to develop a “more reciprocal” relationship. Says Feldstein, “Doing all this research on [her] life, I can imagine it could be a little odd. I wanted her to get to know me too.”
Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton is depicted in the series, with Clive Owen playing the former president—but in terms of screen time, the relationship is more peripheral than the Tripp friendship. Still, seeing Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton depicted onscreen provides new and unsettling nuance about the power imbalance between Lewinksy and Clinton, who was two decades older than his employee and the leader of the free world.
“Monica was very clear then, and is still very clear now, that their relationship was consensual. But just because there’s consent does not mean that there is not deep power imbalance,” says Feldstein. “With any intern dating their boss, there is a clear power imbalance…. But when it is not only the boss, but the most powerful man in the country, maybe arguably the world, the imbalance is just very clear. [That dynamic] permeates into everything. Because he is the president, she can’t contact him. He has to contact her. She can’t just see him. She has to get clearance to come to the White House. Then that becomes a 22-year-old, 23-year-old girl, not socializing, not going out with her family because she’s waiting for a call. I think watching it in the series is more visceral than necessarily reading it or thinking about it.”
Feldstein is excited for the series to premiere September 7, and for audiences to finally get a new perspective on the impeachment saga. “So often the story is told from Newt Gingrich versus Bill Clinton or Ken Starr versus Bill Clinton perspective,” says Feldstein. “We wanted to show you the women that were kind of tossed aside during that time, and not just from the perspective of their lipstick color or their weight or their nose or the way that they spoke, but the humanity and the interior life within them.”
The actor is looking forward to all audiences seeing Lewinsky’s story from this angle—but she is particularly thrilled that younger generations will “take in the story for the first time from the female perspective.”
The actor and her castmates experienced firsthand the impact that the premiere had on an audience after a small screening in New York.
“One of the women brought her 17-year old-daughter and her daughter was like, ‘Can I please meet Monica? All I want is to meet Monica,’” recalls Feldstein. “That was very moving for all of us, because there was none of that in the ’90s. Monica was a meal for society to sort of pick at. It was all about her weight or her intentions, or other men that she’d been with coming forward in a grotesque, horrific way to throw her under the bus in order for them to get media attention. She was an SNL character…. It’s so exciting to me that younger generations can just know this very human portrait of Monica Lewinsky.”
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