Sarah Paulson: I met you in 2002. How old were you in 2002?
Billie Lourd: I was 10. What is that story?
SP: What happened was I met your mother at a dinner party. It was me, David Spade and his wife, the executive of a show I was on, your mother, and just a few other people. We bonded because I had finished an episode of Touched by an Angel with your grandmother a few weeks prior. When we were leaving the party, we drove down Coldwater Canyon, and I was going to drive one way and your mom was going the other way, and she leaned out the window and said, “Do you want to come to a party?” I was like, “What?” And she said, “Do you want to come to Gore Vidal’s makeout party?”
BL: Oh, I remember Gore Vidal’s makeout party!
SP: I said, “Yeah, I guess so.” She said to take down her e-mail. I didn’t have a computer. I didn’t have e-mail at this point. I bought a computer so I could have an e-mail correspondence with your mother.
BL: No way!
SP: So then we started an e-mail correspondence, and she had me come to this party at her house, and I basically didn’t leave. Your mom did that thing that your mom does where she was like—
BL: “Move in with me.”
SP: I did. I stayed. I was never really living there. I would spend the night, but I never had a toothbrush. You were the coolest 10-year-old that ever existed.
...SP: But you hid your curiosity about becoming an actor?
BL: I think in a normal family they would have looked at me and been like, “Hey, this kid’s a performer.” But I was so scared. I was embarrassed, honestly. Because they were like, “This is going to be a really shitty lifestyle, and everyone’s going to be scrutinizing you deeply and constantly.” My mom wrote five books and a one-woman show; they didn’t want more things for people to be able to Google about me.
SP: How did you feel about her sharing those things?
BL: I had a hard time with it in the beginning. I was very protective of my dad and would stop her and be like, “Can you take out that thing where you say, ‘I turned him gay.’ Can we not have that on Broadway?”
SP: Did she listen to you?
BL: She did. Debbie did it to her, so anytime I came up to her and said, “Please tone this down,” she would, because she went through it with Debbie and knew how hard it was. Now, looking back and watching her interviews, I try to model what I do after her. She was so good at it. She would get so annoyed with me if I ever did a fake interview. She’d say, “Tell the real story.”
SP: So what did you do when you decided you wanted to be an actor?
BL: My mom actually pointed me toward it. The first thing I did was Star Wars: The Force Awakens. J.J. Abrams called and said they couldn’t find anybody for this one part and would I come in and read for it. I didn’t get the part, but I got another extra part with three lines. The thing is, I was bizarrely comfortable on set. My mother would pull me aside and be like, “It’s weird that you’re so comfortable here. This is the most uncomfortable environment in the world. If you’re comfortable here, you should do this.”
...SP: Did you get any advice from your family about this business?
BL: Debbie was still encouraging me to put an act together. Literally three days before she died, she was like, “What numbers are you going to put in your act? Who are you going to impersonate?” I said, “I don’t think people do acts as much anymore.” And she came back, “That’s why if you do one you’ll be more successful than anyone else. The act is a dying art, and someone needs to revive it.”
SP: I remember standing in the Red Room off the bar in the house and your mom saying to me, “You’ve got to find the funny, Paulson. If you don’t find the funny, you’re doomed.”
BL: Oh, it’s so important. If life’s not funny, then it’s just true—and that would be unacceptable. Even when she died, that was what got me through that whole thing. When Debbie died the next day, I could just picture her saying, “Well, she’s upstaging me once again, of course—she had to.”
...SP: How has your life changed since your mother and grandmother passed?
BL: I’ve always kind of lived in their shadows, and now is the first time in my life when I get to own my life and stand on my own. I love being my mother’s daughter, and it’s something I always will be, but now I get to be just Billie.
SP: Is it scary?
BL: It is. It’s a lot of pressure, because she had such an incredible legacy, and now I have to uphold that and make it evolve in my own way. And a lot of people have had experiences like mine, too. Tons of people grow up with mentally ill parents who have drug problems. I read this incredible book, Adult Children of Alcoholics—it’s not a great narrative, but it’s a fun psych book.
Read the full interview at Town and Country.
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