Dennis O’Hare plays the conman Stanley on this season of AHS. Find out what he had to say on a call about live-tweeting, his roles, and what’s next.
On a conference call this past week, Dennis O’Hare opened up the call speaking about Murphy’s ability to offer actors the chance to take these characters to their extreme. He mentions a moment from last week’s episode saying, “While I was standing in the road basically doing obscene things to Michael Chiklis I thought, ‘can we push the envelope further? How much envelope is left?’ But we never know what’s going to happen. It’s Ryan’s world and we just wait for word.” O’Hare is of course referring to the question everyone has on their minds, will he return for another season of AHS?
But fans of O’Hare’s characters can rest easy. The actor assures us, “[Murphy] would love for me to be in next season, but that’s an informal invitation. Until he comes up with the idea and until he finds parts for us, we really have to wait.”
In a moment of casual chatter, O’Hare mentions what he will up to while waiting for that call from Murphy. “I’m also a playwright and I write plays with a writing partner, Lisa Peterson. We wrote a play called An Iliad, which is a one-man version of the Trojan War. And our next play is called The Good Book. It’s about the Bible. It’s being done at the Court Theatre in Chicago starting in early March. So, I have to go into rehearsals on February 17 as a playwright,” he says. Not much of a hiatus if you ask us!
If you have seen any Murphy/Falchuck production you know by now that nothing is off limits and if they can find a way to tackle an issue in a given season, they will make it work. O’Hare comments specifically on the issues the gay community faces in the 50s that Freak Show addresses saying, “I think what’s so great about Ryan and Brad and the team of writers is that they’re never content to simply write about one thing. They’re always using the occasion to raise awareness or consciousness. And certainly this series this year seems to be about physical abnormalities and what we consider to be a freak, or normal, but there are subtler applications. And one of the subtler applications, of course, is the way that gay people were thought of and treated.”
He goes on to discuss the difference between Dell’s (Michael Chiklis) character and his own Stanley saying, “it’s really interesting to see Dell as one expression of that, somebody who’s so deeply closeted that he actually considers hanging himself in the last episode, to someone like Stanley, who just seems to roll with it. It seems to be part of his lifestyle, which is admittedly not a healthy lifestyle; he’s a professional liar, but there is a sense in which he’s a lot more, I guess, at ease with it. I think it is pretty amazing to have that snapshot of what it was like to be a gay person in the 1950s.”
In season 1, O’Hare played Larry Harvey and returned in season 3 as the mute Spalding. What do these characters have in common? Well, scenes with Jessica Lange for one, and some kind of physical abnormality. He comments on the continuing themes of his characters saying, “There was a weird thing between Jessica and I, we always were in some sort of symbiotic relationship, never healthy. In year one I was her lover but being used by her. And in year three I was her servant/wanna be lover. This year I’m definitely not a romantic interest in her, but I’m in an unhealthy symbiotic partnership of sorts.” As for the make up process, O’Hare remarks that he got off easy this year! No burnt skin, or crazy wigs, just a mustache brushing and some sun spots!
O’Hare is not shy about touching on the distracting nature of live tweeting as an episode airs. He says, “As a theater person I find it sort of, I don’t know, distracting in terms of watching the experience. I do wonder how much anybody can pay attention when they are thinking about the next clever thing to say. I know that as a person watching it I can’t take in a lot of what I’m seeing, so I usually have to watch it a second time just to get the feeling of the episodes. Because I think you lose tone and you break the magic, which is the magic that we weave.”
At the end of the day, it is the characters that keep O’Hare waiting for the next script. He comments that from Larry, whose family was burnt up in a fire, to Spalding’s embodiment of being a doll, to Stanley’s desire for formal acknowledgement, “they’re all yearning for some way of transcending their life into something bigger.” He continues, “They want to arrive somewhere, a place of peace, or a place of recognition.”
If (or when) he returns for another round of AHS, O’Hare has a few ideas for Murphy to play around with. O’Hare says, “I don’t feel like we’ve really, really explored the idea of things closing in on people.” Clostrophobia aside, O’Hare would like to work with some animate fears. “we haven’t really explored the whole fear of extraterrestrial monsters. And if you think about all of the movies in the ’50s where part of the thing was whether it was Godzilla or some sort of, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, actual creatures who are actually fearful,” he says.
While O’Hare may not vibe with Stanley in every way, there is one part of his character that resonates with him personally. O’Hare says, “What I love about [Stanley] is that he’s ultimately an optimistic person. He believes in the fact that in any given day he can make things better, and I do share that with him. I tend to be an optimist. I tend to believe that every day’s a new day, and today I’m going to get things right.”
Make sure to tune into this week’s AHS: Freak Show to see more from Stanley and the rest of the cast!
AHS: Freak Show episode 10, “Orphans,” airs Wednesday, December 17 at 10:00 p.m. ET on FX.