Hold Your BreathFirst Look: Sarah Paulson Teases a 'Descent Into Madness' in New Thriller (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Sarah Paulson stars as Margaret in Hulu’s ‘Hold Your Breath’.Photo:Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

InSarah Paulson’s latest film, dust slips through every crack — and she slips into madness.

Set in Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma,Hold Your Breathstars theTony-winning actress, 49, as Margaret, a grieving mother whose tireless dedication to her daughters’ safety devolves into something more sinister. PEOPLE has an exclusive first look.

“Mother-daughter connection is at the core of the story,” Paulson says. “It’s not a slasher movie. It is really, at its core, an emotional story about a woman who is desperate to keep her children safe.”

Before stepping into the shoes of the survival-obsessed matriarch, Paulson says she watched Ken Burns’Dust Bowldocumentary and studied Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression-era photographs to better understand the era and its horrors.

“The movie, the unraveling, takes us into a different space, but the reality, the foundational circumstance of the movie, is one of a real American horror,” she says. “This idea that you couldn’t even leave your home, and then even inside your home you couldn’t prevent the dust from getting inside.”

Sarah Paulson in ‘Hold Your Breath’.Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Also an executive producer on the project, Paulson says she was immediately taken with writer and co-director Karrie Crouse’s “wildly potent” screenplay.

“I thought the script was so beautiful, and on the face of it, something that I could tap into from a human perspective,” she says. “I don’t have children, but I am an aunt to my sister’s children — and I have three dogs I’m absolutely obsessed with!”

“You should see me walking my dogs. I have a headlamp on, I’ve got a can of coins to rattle if I see a coyote. It’s almost comical the way I look at night when I’m walking my dogs, and it’s because I’m afraid something’s going to happen to them,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do about that reality.”

Ebon Moss-Bachrach in ‘Hold Your Breath’.Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

That fear — and more specifically, the way she reacts to it — is exactly what she channeled inHold Your Breath.

“When you’re talking about a descent into madness, potentially, you always think about control and some of what happens when the spiral starts to unspool,” she says.

“The minute Margaret can no longer stop the dust from getting inside the house, the minute she can no longer feed her family because the cows got nothing to eat, the more things get more desperate and desperate and scarier and scarier for her in terms of their survival — and the more unhinged she becomes because she can’t do anything about it.”

Paulson also had a hand in curating the film’s cast, which boasts the talents ofThe Bear’sEbon Moss-Bachrach, Annaleigh Ashford,as well as Amiah Miller and Alona Jane Robbins, who portray her onscreen daughters.

Casting Miller, she says, was a “no-brainer,” while breakout star Robbins quickly reminded Paulson of a familiar face: “I was like, ‘Oh, well, she’s Meryl Streep, so we should just all sit down and just give Meryl Streep as many takes as she wants.' "

“I’ll be able to say, ‘I knew them both when,’ basically,” Paulson says of the young stars — a claim she also makes about Moss-Bachrach.

“I think the truth is, I’ve been a fan for all of my adult life … I’ve always been an enormous admirer of his work,” she says of the actor, adding that when “everyone was talking about [The Bearstar]Jeremy Allen White— who is no doubt an extraordinarily great actor — I kept being like, ‘What about what Ebon’s doing on that show?’ ”

Amiah Miller in ‘Hold Your Breath’.Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

So when she suggested Moss-Bachrach for the film, directors Crouse and Will Joines “were so immediately on board,” Paulson says. “‘Cause it’s not hard to convince people to hire people when the people you want them to hire happen to be really special, alive, responsive actors and people.”

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Shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the period thriller also features some seriously stunning visuals courtesy, in part, of some very real dust, Paulson says.

To create the all-consuming storms, the film employed “a lot of loose dirt,” she recalls. “We had a real situation on our hands that was sort of like the Dust Bowl itself, sort of self-created.”

“I was that crazy person who had to fight with the safety coordinator to be like, ‘More dust!’ when I’m standing there with the bandana around my nose,” she says. “I’m one of those actors that — this probably is a communication of my lack of skill, actually — where it’s like, the more real it can be, the better.”

Sarah Paulson and Alona Jane Robbins in ‘Hold Your Breath’.Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

And, as improbable as it sounds, grappling with the dirt was perhaps her favorite on-set memory. “God, I think the truth is that I loved running from the dust storms in this movie,” she says. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.

“With the haze and the dust, it was really hard to see," Paulson says. “And when you’re hyperventilating like that and trying to communicate all that internalized terror, it’s hard — especially when you’re doing it all day for 17 hours. By the end of it, I felt like I had really been something, and my only hope is that there’ll be a visceral similar experience for the audience.”

Hold Your Breathis on Hulu Oct. 3.

source: people.com