![Molly Ringwald and Tom Hollander in the finale of 'Feud: Capote vs. the Swans'](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/truman_capote_feud_finale.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
[This story contains spoilers from Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, ” “Phantasm Forgiveness.”]
Truman Capote never finished his novel Answered Prayers, the exposé on high society whose early excerpts set off a decades-long feud between the novelist and the wealthy socialite women he referred to as his “swans.” Though, an unfinished version of the book was published posthumously in the United States in 1987. Yet in the final episode of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, creator Ryan Murphy along with writer Jon Robin Baitz imagine a Capote who, facing death at 59 years old as a result of his substance abuse, desires to right the wrongs that led to his demise, the aspect of his life the FX series set out to explore.
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“This charts a decline as his world — the things he appreciates and lives for — are all crumbling around him,” Baitz had explained to reporters, including The Hollywood Reporter, prior to the series airing. “This is a story of the dying fall of a man who’s in despair.”
For Tom Hollander, who portrays Capote onscreen, it was important to detail the elements of the In Cold Blood writer’s life that facilitated that decline. From being abandoned by his mother who so desperately craved to be a part of society’s elite to later developing that same insatiable craving for belonging, which was only superficially fed by his swans — Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), Ann Woodward (Demi Moore), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), and C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny) — until his need for fame caused him to betray their trust and, in turn, expose how disposable they considered him to be.
“He was an accouterment,” Hollander said ahead of the show’s debut. “He was a dazzling accouterment on their dinner table. 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 and didn’t have time for. He was filling a great gap in their emotional lives, and he was brilliant. He was an incredibly entertaining, perceptive, clever, interesting, singular man. That’s what they were getting out of it. Quite a lot. Until it went wrong.”
Now, following the season finale of the Feud anthology, Hollander talks with THR about getting into the mind of Capote, why things went so wrong with his relationships, and why he ultimately considers the author “heroic in some ways.”
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When this opportunity to portray Truman Capote came to you, was the answer an immediate yes?
Oh, yes, it was. It was definitely an immediate yes. Ryan Murphy, Gus Van Sant, Jon Robin Baitz, it was an amazing, creative team. You couldn’t say no. There were nerves, obviously, because Philip Seymour Hoffman was so utterly brilliant [in Capote]. It was a question of, was there anything further that an actor could do in the part? But the scripts were too good, and I’d always wanted to work with those people, so I had to just go, “Yes, of course.”
You auditioned to play Capote in Infamous nearly 20 years ago. Do you think you would’ve brought the same execution to that role had you gotten it, as you did to Feud?
I don’t think so. It’s a good question. I think whatever I was bringing to it then, I couldn’t have brought what I’ve brought to it this time because I’m older and it’s about that last period in his life. I needed to bring all of the acquisitions of age, the knowledge of the long shadows that you get when you’re a bit older, which wouldn’t have been there at the beginning that first time around. So this was the right time, and the right script, and the right version.
What materials outside of the script did you use to inform your portrayal?
The materials that I used were easily accessible. They were the many, many bits of Dick Cavett interviews and so on that Truman did. And he obviously got to a point in his life where he couldn’t stop going on talk shows and so they were all there as a resource for me. And to a lesser extent, I’m ashamed to say, his writing. I used it to a lesser extent, though I had read a certain amount of it before. But for me, it was about becoming him physically and vocally, so I relied on the TV stuff.
When did you feel like you’d nailed the voice?
I didn’t. I never got to that point. Jerome Butler, my brilliant voice teacher, and I worked together for a couple of months before we even started shooting. And it wasn’t until, I think maybe about two or three weeks into the shoot, a supporting artist in a restaurant scene came up and said, “That voice sounds great,” and because they were a complete stranger, and they had no reason to say it, I believed that, so I started to relax. But that was already weeks into shooting. Also, it’s something that you don’t sort of just get, you have to keep maintaining it. Like, if you asked me to do it on the phone now, I would give you a caricature of it. I wouldn’t be able to do it, so you have to keep going. Every day I would work at it, before every scene I would work at it, and say a few sentences to myself. That’s how it works.
How much did the other aspects of costuming help you get into the headspace of Capote?
Oh, enormously. Lou Eyrich is our brilliant costume designer and I’ve never seen anyone work so hard, just relentless research into the period and Truman’s real clothes that he wore. There was a different outfit for every single scene, so it was an astonishing amount of work just for that character, let alone all the swans. And when you put them on, you do start to feel a bit more like him, and then when they do the hair as well. The most transformative thing, and this I’ve not said to anyone in any of the interviews, I remember now was the coloring of my eyebrows, painting them fair. That was when I thought, “Ah, now I’m someone different.”
Each of the swans carries out their personal vendetta against Capote in their own way. Was there anyone you particularly enjoyed dueling it out with onscreen?
It was a huge privilege to work with all of those ladies. They’re all iconic in their own right, so it was amazing that I got to meet them and have time with them as individuals as well as a group. There were moments where I had real connection with all of them and they’re an amazing bunch of people and it was a great honor. The person that I spent the most time with was Naomi because Babe and Truman were the closest, so we had the most scenes together. But I admired them all equally.
Over time, Babe seems open to reconciliation with Capote, but in the series, they never cross paths again except for a chance interaction in episode four. Is that true to history?
What a beautiful scene that is. Naomi and I both cried when we read that, but I don’t know whether Babe felt she could be reconciled to him in that way. That was sort of an arm’s-length reconciliation, wasn’t it? It’s sort of a “Go. Go be happy but go away.” It’s not exactly, “Come back, all is forgiven.”
In the series finale we see Capote pondering finishing Answered Prayers as a form of an apology and a confession and explanation for what he’d done. Do we know if that was going to be his intention had he finished the book before his death?
I don’t think so. My understanding of our episode eight is that it’s a sort of fantasy. It’s giving it a happy ending, an atoning. This is what his alter ego could have done to make it all okay. I think it’s Robbie’s conceit in that episode that we’re constructing a sort of happy dream ending, almost lived in the bit as you die, that last moment of consciousness, it’s like that. As if he could go around and heal everything.
In that episode, Capote says, “I don’t want love, I want forgiveness.” Do you believe that’s what he truly desired at that time?
I think at that point, he does. He wants to atone. I think he was probably desperately lonely. I don’t think he trusted love anymore, because I don’t think he really knew what that was. He never really received any as a child, so he didn’t recognize it when it was there. If Jack Dunphy was giving him love, he didn’t see it as that. He saw it as somebody trying to stop him having fun. It’s a sad tale.
We see that inner turmoil manifest outwardly through Jessica Lange who portrays Capote’s mother. What was it like working with her and exploring that relationship dynamic?
In our telling of the story, the idea was that her own journey was to try to achieve some sort of position in Upper East Side society, which she did tenuously with Joe Capote, who then adopted Truman, but it all fell apart and they were never really accepted. He was never really fancy enough and it went bust and then she committed suicide, and she’d also abandoned Truman as a very young boy. It’s such a dark story, and in some way, you can’t help feeling that Truman’s own trajectory through the upper echelons of New York society was in some way compensation for what his mother had aspired to, some way of getting close to her, making up for her disappointment. The Black and White Ball in our story is everything his mother could possibly have wanted and more, so he’s doing it for her. That’s what we’re doing in our story, and I got to play those scenes with Jessica Lange, an astonishing actor. I’ve watched her from the time I was a kid so to be acting with her at that level was very exciting and she was completely brilliant. I watched her in front of the camera, and it was like a masterclass.
We also witness Capote suffer physical abuse in one of his romantic relationships, yet the swans don’t seem to view him as a victim per say. Is that a sign of the times and past attitudes toward domestic violence or is there a deeper reality at play?
Well, I think they were old, and they were homophobic, so it didn’t count if Truman was getting himself into stupid situations with the wrong people. They were telling him not to be with John O’Shea, but they don’t see him as a victim of domestic violence. I think they see him as someone who should know better. And he shouldn’t really be gay anyway, so what’s he doing hanging around with rough trade. It’s kind of that, I think, and I think it’s very lonely.
Also, he’d go back like people do when they’re in terrible, circular, destructive relationships with people. They can’t get out of them, and they keep returning to the same. It’s hard to break the cycle.
Do you think that there’s a true villain in this feud?
No, I don’t think there is. Slim is pretty vengeful, but there’s no villain. The thing about feuds is, it’s what we do to each other. The substance of the falling out is never as big as the falling out and the grievance never quite justifies the years of lost friendships. You kind of think, “couldn’t you have just gotten over it?” I think it’s somehow in the nature of a feud that people can’t stop, and it goes too far, and they make a mountain out of a molehill and that mountain becomes the thing. And there’s also love in a feud, isn’t there? There’s love and there’s betrayal, but there isn’t a great crime. I don’t think Truman is a villain. I think it was a very, very difficult life and he was heroic in some ways; he was a warrior. But obviously, that could be me and my defense. I say this because I played him, and when you play a character, you kind of think of them as being heroic, even if they’re not heroic. You’re inside them and no one really considers themselves to be bad in life. We all think we’re doing what we want for a reason, even if history judges us differently.
Read more of THR‘s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans season coverage here.
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