It’s easy to see the parallels between Chloë Sevigny and C. Z. Guest, the character she plays on FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. Both are (or were, in Guest’s case) blonde New Yorkers, take-no-shit attitude and all. They both inspired artists and have been hailed as fashion icons and trendsetters, something Sevigny recently said can come with a good deal of pressure and baggage. Both value the role of decorum in society in some sense, with Sevigny telling Town & Country that she still sends handwritten thank-you notes. They’re both multi-hyphenates, too, with Sevigny garnering acclaim for her recent turn directing a short film about New York club legend Lypsinka, and Guest dabbling in acting and cashmere-sweater design before penning a series of gardening books in her golden years.
Sevigny has read those books, too, and says they’re beautiful and inspirational in their own unique way. Calling Guest the precursor to Martha Stewart, Sevigny says she admires her onscreen alter ego’s pluck and determination. “She had these things that brought her joy, and she wanted to give back to people so that they could find joy in them, too,†she explains. “My mother is a gardener, and I think I could be, too, if I didn’t live in the middle of Manhattan.â€
In the Feud finale, we get to see C. Z. acting out what Truman thinks she needs or wants, which is to return to her wild youth, or to be free of all constraints and expectations. From your perspective playing her, do you think that’s what she’d want?
I think that, yes, he wants [the Swans] to be able to, as the kids say, live their best lives and not have to keep up appearances, which I think was so much of their daily routine — that façade of composure and grace and elegance that was informed by a kind of reserve. He wanted her to be able to have the wild abandon that she codified more in her youth and had to let go of to become this society swan.
In the beginning of the episode, we flash forward to 2003, when we see Joanne Carson’s portion of Truman’s ashes on the auction block. The Swans stand at the back of the room after it’s all over, these sort of apparitions in white, and they talk about how “society simply evaporated†because people are wearing “flip-flops to a formal auction.†Modern New York, they say, is nothing like old New York. Can you sympathize, as someone who’s lived there for a long time?
There’s a specific lack of elegance they’re talking about, I think. Their level of formality is just gone from the world, and it’s epitomized in that scene, but it’s also supposed to be clever and cute and all the rest of it.
For me, it’s not missing that kind of thing. I miss the variety. The world has just become homogenized. You can go to any city and it feels like there’s less individuality and freedom of expression going on, and people want to fall in line and look like everybody else. And there’s the reality-star aspect and people wanting to be in their sweatpants and with their dogs. They want to look like the celebrities they like, but celebrities were held to a different standard in the past, especially as far as the Swans were concerned. Now there’s this weird line between being you and being like everybody else, or not wanting to flaunt wealth but also flaunting it.
It’s funny that you say that, because I was reading C. Z.’s New York Times obituary in preparation for this interview, which quotes her saying, “​​All the girls today want to be famous, but they haven’t earned their spurs.â€
That’s very fitting. She was very understated, though, because she was the most Waspy of them all, which really makes her stand out from the rest of the Swans. She was a very celebrated debutante, so from a young age she grew up in this certain milieu where you didn’t flaunt what you had. She also comes from her own money and wasn’t just marrying into it, which I think really sets her apart as well.
She had so many interests, too, like horse riding and gardening, outside of just entertaining and being a housewife. She really was very self-possessed in that way, which, for a woman of her stature, was not necessary.
Do you think having that distance, those hobbies, and that money kept her from repercussions when she continued to hang out with Truman after his story was published?
I haven’t, in my research, come across anything that informs why she kept their friendship. I think that she just wanted to be the bridge between the groups, and for some reason, her lady friends let her do that. They didn’t exclude her, and maybe it was because of her stature within society. I’m not sure.
There are obvious similarities between you and C. Z., but did you come to identify with her more deeply over the course of filming the show?
I really identified with watching someone you love fall prey to addiction. I’ve lost lots of close friends to drugs and alcohol, and to me, the show is so much an examination of that. When you watch someone just wasting everything about themselves … The moments where I got to lean into that were really what the show was about for me.
Did you pull from your own emotional well for that? And did that make playing those scenes easier or harder, because you had to bring that pain to the surface?
It was somewhat real. The tears were not hard to come by in the scenes where I was doing that. They were readily flowing, because I could relate it to so much.
I also have such a deep love for Truman as a writer and as a cultural icon — the person who he was in the time that he was, and how he conducted himself. Also, with Tom [Hollander] so fully inhabiting him, it was so easy to play off him and imagine how she was feeling. Not to say that it wasn’t hard, but the world that they created was so immersive for us that it was easy to get to where you had to go.
Everyone I know who’s been watching Feud has then transferred to some ancillary material, whether it’s reading In Cold Blood or reading Babe Paley’s Wikipedia page or ordering Slim Keith’s book online. Did you do any extracurricular reading?
George Plimpton’s Capote book is brilliant, obviously. The black-and-white ball oral history. There’s so much YouTube footage of him from talk shows to watch, and there’s just so much out there to read.
I love Breakfast at Tiffany’s. So many people say that they read the book but they’ve only seen the movie, and the book is so much better, in my opinion. It’s much more complex, because they couldn’t actually make the movie that it needed to be when they made it. So I think for the novice, that would be a really great place to start.
Also, the book the show was based off, Capote’s Women, is definitely worth reading. You get to read about all these different women and these truncated histories of their affairs and marriages. It’s a pretty juicy read. You get to see how Truman leaned into what signified their lifestyle and why it was important to them, like the gloves, the hats, the manners, the seating charts, the flatware, the plates. One of my favorite shows is The Gilded Age, which leans really heavily into that kind of stuff, too, and I love immersing myself in the world in a different time. And thankfully, Ryan Murphy is really good at that.
There are a couple unanswered questions at the end of the series: Who bought Truman’s ashes, and what happened to Answered Prayers. Do you have theories on either?
I don’t think that there’s any evidence of the rest of the book text anywhere. I think he didn’t write it. I can’t see anyone destroying it, thinking that it would actually be protecting him.
I personally don’t like that book, though. I find it really crass, and I think it tarnishes his legacy in a way — not because of what he did to his friends but because of the content of that piece. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not an intellectual and I don’t understand enough of it, but I don’t like it as a read.
What do you hope Hollywood takes from the success of this show?
This is always the hardest question. Many things, really. Complex female characters and complex gay leading men. Spending money on productions. Stories where the stakes are high but they’re also not standard stakes; they’re more complex. Also, to read more books and to appreciate more literary figures.