SARAH PAULSON Lives for the DRAMA Or at least, all of her best characters do.

The actress lets us in on her enviable Hollywood life ahead Ryan Murphy's next juicy series, ALL'S FAIR.

- Jazmine Hughes

SARAH PAULSON HAS BEEN INSIDE THE Metropolitan Museum of Art many times—having attended five real Met Galas and one fake one while filming Ocean's 8—but today she is visiting simply as a civilian, a woman in search of art. “It’s funny to be here as a person just enjoying the museum,” she says on a particularly mobbed summer Friday afternoon. “You're like, Oh, this is what it’s for.”

To describe Paulson is to pull out all the offbeat adjectives from the back of the drawer: She's zany and ribald and outré, telling me about her Bart Simpson-esque burps and debating what we should call boobs (“I'm certainly not saying ‘breasts.’ I know someone who says ‘bosom,’ and that's not my favorite thing, and she knows I don’t like to hear the word. And maybe that person is Holland Taylor”). When the ticket scanner makes a Martian-sounding zap as we enter the museum, she makes a zap sound right back. She had been eager to see the John Singer Sargent exhibition, in part because Taylor, an actress and Paulson’s partner of ten years, has told Paulson that she reminds her of Sargent’s best-known work, Madame X. A painting of an elegant 19th-century socialite in a black gown that contrasts starkly with her pearlescent skin, the portrait was considered shocking for the time. “It was something I wore or something, and she said, ‘Sometimes you look like a Sargent painting,’” Paulson recalls.

Paulson moves sylphlike and with an understated eroticism through the museum. She's dressed in an oversize striped button-down shirt and white cotton pants by The Row, her face dewy (“I'm serving no-makeup realness”) since she has met me after a facial. She marvels at Sargent’s adroitness with light and shadow, his sensual renderings of texture and movement, and the sheer size of his canvases, exclaiming “I love it!” or “Gorgeous!” under her breath. “I wasn’t a museum person. Holland has absolutely changed something,” she says.