Sarah Paulson on Why Her 'Glass' Character is Better as Woman, Talks Watching James McAvoy Perform on Set

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is set to drop Glass on Friday with actress Sarah Paulson as the franchise's newest recruit. Paulson is no stranger to appearing in psychological horror projects, regularly appearing in Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story series. She's arguably the perfect addition to Glass nut her character, Dr. Ellie Staple, was almost written to be played by a man.

Written and directed by Shyamalan, Glass is the third installment in the Unbreakable series—coming after Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016). Picking up after Split's conclusion, the movie follows the return of David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) as they are entered into a mental institution alongside current resident Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson). They're brought together by Paulson's character Dr. Staple, who aims to tap into their "delusion of grandeur" as the trio believes they have powers like comic-book characters.

Paulson's Dr. Staple plays a significant role in Glass. Although Shyamalan admitted to going back-and-forth between having a male or a female psychiatrist, the character works best as a woman due to a female's ability to examine the male character's situations with more sensitivity.

"I don't know what the dynamic would've been if it had been a man. I do think allowing a woman to be there and allowing for her to have as much strength, authority and power she has and also bring her femaleness to it—which is her empathy, compassion, and ability to sympathize—while still trying to reason with them in a way, I think, never feels particularly pedantic," Paulson, 44, told Newsweek. "She is trying to do what she truly thinks is best for them without ever seeming superior or all knowing. I think having a woman do that somehow makes all that more possible."

Paulson didn't read Shyamalan's script for Glass. She was a fan of Unbreakable, a film she deemed to be her "favorite of all of his movies" because it was a "beautiful meditation on loneliness." She saw Split in theaters as well. While she's agreed to parts in Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story without reading a script, she was happy to do the same with Shyamalan due to her love for his work. She even cried when she was offered the part. "I said yes to doing it before I read what I was going to do. I was just so excited that I had more than one scene," she said.

"The year prior, I had done The People v. O.J., which was the most extraordinary acting role I'd ever had in my life. I thought, I'm never going to get to do something that exciting again," she explained. "I'm so afraid I'm never going to have that experience of really diving so deeply into something that I didn't know where she stopped and I began...Night called me. Even though I hadn't read it, he'd said to me: 'This is a great part and you're going to be great in it.' It had just made me think that I had not had a part, at that point, in a movie that felt that it was going to be substantial enough for me to sink my teeth into and something that was going to excite me. So I cried like a baby."

With a film like Glass, it would likely come at no surprise to viewers that the set was creepy. It was shot in a real mental hospital that had been abandoned years prior. Paulson considered the film's set to not be her "favorite place" because it was "freezing cold, there was no insulation, [and] there was no heat." However, one thing she thought was "amazing" about being on set was watching McAvoy's Kevin—who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—perform as several identities within one scene.

"Those are not all different takes Night's putting together. Those are just things that are happening in the scene," she explained. "He just jumps from one thing to the next. It's really something to see. It was like having a front row seat for a real master class in acting. It's one thing to sit in the audience and watch it. It's another thing to be in the room in the where it happens, to quote Hamilton."

Glass opens nationwide on Friday.