Falco did make choices in her portrayal of Hillary. In Tuesday’s episode, Bill wakes up Hillary on the the morning of his grand jury testimony to reveal that he has lied to her about his relationship with Lewinsky. In the scene, Bill explains that he did have an affair—and Falco decided to react with shock and fury.
“I spoke to director Rachel Morrison…but we were operating under the assumption that she believed what she believed at those moments. It’s complicated psychologically, because who knows what she actually knew, even in a deeper place, and what she was willing to admit to herself. Nobody knows but Hillary. But based on the information I was given, and the views of the filmmakers, this is what went on.”
To play Hillary, Falco was outfitted in the first lady’s ’90s fashions—painstaking recreations of oft photographed pants suits accessorized with headbands and gold broaches. Asked about the wardrobe, the Sopranos and Nurse Jackie star does not mince words.
“I have absolutely no interest in the costumes,” says the actor. “I want to know that the people who have been hired have an obsessive interest in it. When I show up, I really am just like a mannequin. I never have ideas about wardrobe. I used to think that was a fault. And now I realize, no, I just do my job. I would not want them telling me how to do my job.”
The actor similarly did not ask questions when it came to her costar, whom she met the first day of filming. Owen was already outfitted in full Bill Clinton prosthetics and costume.
“I thought I knew what Clive Owen looked like,” she remembers, laughing at her confusion. “I just thought, He looks different. And then at one point I was pulling out of the parking lot and some attractive man is running towards my window saying, ‘Hey, hold on, hold on.’ And I feel like, Oh, my God, that’s Clive Owen. The whole time we were together, he looked like Bill.”
“It wasn’t just with Clive,” she adds. They were filming during the height of COVID restrictions, when myriad precautions were taken on set. “I didn’t know what anybody looked like between the masks and the plastic shields. I didn’t ever know who the hell I was talking to. It was very strange.”
The series highlights the unfair and cruel ways that the women in Clinton’s orbit were treated—infuriating moments to revisit from a more evolved cultural standpoint. In Tuesday’s episode, after Hillary appears alongside Bill during the 60 Minutes interview—a P.R. Hail Mary she reluctantly agrees to—the first lady is told that the television appearance bolstered Bill’s popularity, but somehow hurt hers.
Did those gender imbalances anger and shock Falco on behalf of Hillary?
“I was doing it more from the point of view that those were how things were at the time,” she says. “I mean, I could compare this to the fucking Sopranos.” To play Carmela on that series, which premiered in 1999, the actor had to arrive hours ahead of shooting so her character’s appearance could be perfected—“the hair, the makeup, the nails, the jewelry…then Jim Gandolfini would come in and be on set two seconds later. But that’s the show that I was doing, about a woman who liked to get dressed up. So you do the show that you do under the circumstances that you do it. So no, I wasn’t shocked by any of it. That was the world…the world is evolving, and thank God for that.”
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