Steven Prusakowski
Ryan Murphy’s Feud anthology series is back for a second installment on FX and its salacious as ever. This time around the series takes aim at a man who seemed to know everyone’s business, Truman Capote played by Tom Hollander. The eight-episode limited series titled Feud: Capote vs. The Swans premiered on FX on January 31st with two very intriguing episodes.
The limited series based on Laurence Leamer’s best-selling book, “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era.” The series focuses on writer Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) and the elite group of glamorous socialites he surrounded himself with whom he nicknamed the Swans. They are played by a list of some of Hollywood’s most esteemed actresses: Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart, Demi Moore, and Molly Ringwald.
Capote cozies up with the Swans, becoming their confidant, only to betray them by writing a thinly-veiled fictionalization of their lives and exposing their most intimate secrets. As a result he was essentially banished from high society, leaving him to spiral into his own self-destruction. Awards Radar took part in a press conference with the cast and show creator/executive producer Ryan Murphy, writer Jon Robin Baits, director Gus Van Sant during which Hollander provided some insight into why the Swans befriended Capote.
“I think he was the greatest writer of his generation, so for a bunch of people that were very rich and fancy houses but kind of, at some level, disempowered by their marriages, to have the greatest writer of his generation in their salons made,” explained the actor.
“He was a dazzling accouterment on their dinner table and maybe he would celebrate them. So maybe at some level, their vanity was flattered by having him around and him understanding them and listening to them in a way that their husbands weren’t, didn’t have time for,” continued Hollander. “He was filling a great gap in their emotional lives, and he was brilliant. He was an incredibly entertaining, perceptive, clever, interesting, singular man, so they were all- so I’d say that’s what they were getting out of it. Quite a lot. Until it went wrong.”
Held down by the misogyny of their times, Hollander believes in more modern days they would have their own successful businesses and brands. “I think the frustration and the sadness was baked into that time,” he explained. “That’s one of the reasons they turned to Truman, because they were all in marriages or with men who constantly put them in their place and told them they weren’t enough.”
“Truman was the one who said to them, ‘You’re actually smarter than your husbands, you control everything. All of these lives are because of what you’re doing.’ And there’s a baked-in sadness in that, that so many women of that generation, I think, that we wanted to write to. And there’s nothing more depressing than lost potential, which I think they all really had.” While Capote was feeding them what they wanted to hear it does not quite explain why his betrayal hit so deep, creating the massive divide that would never be closed.
According the Capote actor the feud was instigated by one of the seven deadly sins and perhaps the most dangerous as we have seen too many times over the last decade, pride. “I think maybe they (the Swans) didn’t really think he was one of them. And he didn’t believe that he was one of them either. He knew that he was a sort of, at some level, he was a tourist in their world, and at some level they thought he was lucky to be there,” shared Hollander. “So when he turned, or when they felt he turned, they were vicious because they- “From you? You were the adornment in our house. You are not our equal.” And I think at some level he probably knew that, which is why it’s why he writes “Côte Basque” in the way that he does, because at some level he’s enraged at his own position – he’s somewhere between them and their staff. He’s not quite at the same level as them.”
(New episodes of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans will premiere on FX every Wednesday then land on Hulu the following day.)
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