From left: Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex), Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Honorable Woman), Taraji P. Henson (Empire) Jessica Lange (American Horror Story: Freak Show), Ruth Wilson (The Affair) and Viola Davis (How to Get Away with Murder).
Read more Taraji P. Henson, Viola Davis and Drama Actress A-List Tackle Race, Sexism, Aging in Hollywood
"I got rejected so often, I gave myself two years. If I didn't act in two years, I knew that I wasn't good enough, and therefore I wouldn't do it," Ruth Wilson tells The Hollywood Reporter of her early career struggles.
"I don't mind being controversial. I wanted to challenge the stigma of affairs," Wilson says about starring on Showtime's steamy drama The Affair. "Women are always seen as the vixens and the scarlet ladies because he's the married man with the kids."
"Cookie scared the hell out of me," Empire's Taraji P. Henson admits to THR. "I got nervous and started pacing the floor. 'Oh my God, Cookie is bigger than life. You will love her or hate her.'" She adds, joking, "I hate that bitch. She's stolen my identity! My friends don't want to talk to me unless it's about Cookie."
"Deciding to do Masters was really scary," says Lizzy Caplan, who plays real-life sex research pioneer Virginia 'Ginny' Johnson on Showtime's Masters of Sex. "Luckily, it served the character to feel like a fish out of water, but I do see myself as somebody who can do TV and film, which I didn't before."
"It's nice to play someone who is not likable, someone who does dubious things," Caplan tells THR. "That's the thing in cable — they let us do more. I've done network TV, and it's all about people constantly trying to figure out ways to make you relatable, which adds a layer of exhaustion to it."
"I thought: 'OK, this is your moment to not typecast yourself, to play a woman who is sexualized and do your investigative work to find out who this woman is and put a real woman on TV who's smack-dab in the midst of this pop fiction,'" says How to Get Away with Murder's Viola Davis about her initial thoughts on playing the lead in the Shonda Rhimes drama.
"I've been in the process of retiring for the last 30 years," admits American Horror Story's Jessica Lange. "But the thing about acting, it's so seductive. You get drawn into a role … it's like a love affair. It can still seduce you after 40 years, which is kind of amazing."
"I loved the tornado and chaos of never knowing where the show was going," says Lange about starring in Ryan Murphy's FX anthology series. "You also never knew when your character's backstory was going to be introduced and you discover that she'd had her legs amputated in a snuff film in the Weimar Republic."
"When I was really young, I auditioned for this really bad movie with vampires. I wore a dress to the audition that I thought was really hot. Then I was told I wasn't hot enough," Maggie Gyllenhaal tells THR. "My manager at the time said, 'Would you go back and sex it up a little bit?' So I put on leather pants, a pink leopard skinny camisole and did the audition again and still didn't get the part."
On starring in her first television show, the Honorable Woman actress admits, "I had a moment of panic in my trailer where I thought, 'Everybody on set is relying on me, but so are my two little girls and my husband [actor Peter Sarsgaard]. How the f— am I going to do this?'"
"I had only done one sex scene before The Affair. Dominic [West] and I are really insistent that those scenes in the show have a narrative," Wilson says, before adding, "There are assumptions that women are always the focus of titillation. And I wanted my contract to say: 'For every female orgasm, there had to be a male orgasm.'"
Where did the inspiration for Henson's Cookie Lyon come from? "A lot of people think those came from a woman I know, but actually Cookie is based on my dad. You either loved him or you hated him because he was always speaking truth," she says.
"There was a scene last season where I take my robe off, I'm naked and then transition into locked-eye [with Michael Sheen's character], full-on masturbation from beginning to end," Caplan tells THR about one of her most difficult nude scenes to film. "I remember being in my trailer before that scene and thinking for the first time since the show started: 'I really don't want to go out there and do this.' "
"The women in my life who are sexualized are anywhere from a size zero to a size 24. They don't walk like supermodels in heels. They take their wig and makeup off at night. So this role was my way of saying, 'Welcome to womanhood!' " Davis says of her Murder character. "It's also healed me and shown a lot of little dark-skinned girls with curly hair a physical manifestation of themselves."
Henson, Caplan, Gyllenhaal, Lange, Wilson, and Davis sit down with THR's Stacey Wilson Hunt.
On what she would do if she quit acting, Lange jokes, "I've only done two things in my life — be a waitress and an actress. So I'd probably do something far afield. I've even thought, 'What if I studied to be a falconer?' "
"For a long time, I did all these costumed, quiet, innocent women. Then I was offered a role on Luther — this psychotic, sexy, femme fatale character, totally at odds with what I'd done before," says Wilson of breaking free of typecasting.
"In The Honorable Woman, my character Nessa is so controlled, I wanted the sex to be animal," Gyllenhaal jokingly tells THR. "Unfortunately, it was the BBC and so it couldn't be totally animal."
"I'd like to go back to Broadway and revisit [Henrik Ibsen's] Hedda Gabler at some point. But I mostly want what [actress] Lynn Redgrave said to me once," Davis tells THR. "She said one thing she felt after many years in the business was that her past hadn't counted for anything. I want to feel like my past has counted for something."
"I think sex in film is so interesting. It's uncomfortable to take your clothes off in front of people you don't know, but it can be an opportunity for really interesting acting," Gyllenhaal says. "I'm 37, and I've had two babies, and I'm really interested in nudity now."
Gyllenhaal lists Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch and Pedro Almodovar as her dream collaborators: "I'll play anything they want."