Sarah Paulson Reveals the Julia Roberts Film That Inspired Her to Become an Actress

Sarah Paulson’s locker in high school was “plastered with pictures” of the person who inspired her to become an actress: Julia Roberts.

During her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony acceptance speech on Tuesday, Dec. 2, the American Horror Story star, 50, recalled how Roberts’ 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman inspired her acclaimed career.

“I cannot believe I’m standing here — the Walk of Fame,” Paulson said after describing how her first “connection” to Hollywood was, as a teenager in New York City, watching the Pretty Woman scene in which Roberts’ character is working along Hollywood Boulevard.

“This is, well, it’s outlandish,” Paulson continued. “I’m not saying I didn’t dream of fame. I did. I used to walk around the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, the public school I graduated from in 1993, quoting lines from Julia Roberts’ movies, my locker plastered with pictures of her.”

She added, “All it took for this narcissistic teenage brain to become possessed was for someone to say in passing, rather casually, that I looked a little like her, and that was it. My quest to transform into her was born.”

That quest, the Emmy winner explained, was short-lived.

“I hadn’t really considered that no one thought Julia Roberts’ time was up. No one was looking for a poor man’s version of her,” Paulson said. “She just got here herself. I had to come to the grips with the painful reality that her career was hers and hers alone.”

Later in her speech, Paulson noted a self-revelation about Roberts, 58.

“Quite frankly, it took me too long to understand that Julia Roberts landed in our hearts because she was so unabashedly herself,” she said. “I was so busy dreaming of a working journey that would mimic Julia Roberts, I couldn’t see the road I was already traveling, a road uniquely mine.”

Since then, Paulson has become a force on her own in Hollywood, earning nine Emmy nominations for her roles in Game Change; American Horror Story (Asylum, Coven, Freak Show, Hotel and Cult); American Crime Story (The People v. O.J. Simpson and Impeachment); and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Paulson won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited/Anthology Series or Movie portraying prosecutor Marcia Clark in The People v. O.J. Simpson in 2016. She also won a Golden Globe for that role a few months later.

And at the 2024 Tony Awards, Paulson won Best Leading Actress in a Play for Appropriate, in which she played a daughter who tries to reconnect with her siblings while sorting out her late father’s estate.

Paulson is now starring in the star-studded All’s Fair on Hulu.