Judith Light doesn’t judge her characters.
“We’re not human doings. We are human beings,” the two-time Tony winner tells Vanity Fair. “What is the being of this person? What is the soul of this character? What is it that they are looking for? What is it that they are longing for? I’m curious about that.”
It’s an approach Light has employed time and again in her decades-long career; most recently in her role as “conservative feminist” Susan Carpenter-McMillan on Impeachment: American Crime Story. Carpenter-McMillan, the president and cofounder of the Women’s Coalition, hitches her star to Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee who has accused then president Bill Clinton of exposing himself to her and asking for oral sex in a hotel room. (In real life Clinton denied Jones’s allegations.)
In Jones, Carpenter-McMillan sees a lost soul in need of an ally. She also sees the younger woman as an inroad to humiliating a president with political views that are diametrically opposed to hers. As a longtime vocal advocate for progressive causes such as LGBTQ rights, Light says she wants viewers to judge Carpenter-McMillan for themselves.
“To get into a mindset of someone like that is, for me, intriguing. I have a lot of questions about it. I look at how she might be perceived by people, and I don’t write her off.”
Light got her start in theater, a discipline that she credits for her ability to embody such a broad range of characters. As a young girl, she participated in school plays, and in high school she joined a summer drama program at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, where she later received a degree in drama. She says the rigor of live theater prepared her for TV and film acting, thanks to the depth of rehearsal and character study involved.
As Carpenter-McMillan, Light is equal parts chilling and startlingly likable. Despite Carpenter-McMillan’s conservative values, Light points out that she may be the only person really on Jones’s team. When Jones’s all-male team of lawyers and husband push her to accept a settlement, Carpenter-McMillan steps in and urges her to continue pursuing her case. (Jones’s sexual harassment suit against the president ultimately ended with a settlement in which Clinton agreed to pay Jones $850,000.)
“Paula Jones made a very difficult choice to speak out about this,” says Light. “And it was Susan who saw that she needed some kind of support.”
Still, she says, this isn’t about making Carpenter-McMillan a hero—or even Jones, for that matter. Instead, it’s about looking at these characters as complex women, and about laying bare the truth that sexual violence and misogyny are bipartisan afflictions. “This show is less about Bill Clinton than it is about all of these other women and the way that they were treated,” says Light. They’re at the heart of Impeachment: resolute, flawed, deeply felt, even relatable.
Centering nuanced, multidimensional female characters is a through line not only in Impeachment, but also Light’s career. Whether as divorced businesswoman Angela Bower in the hit ’80s sitcom Who’s the Boss? or Marilyn Miglin, widow of one of Andrew Cunanan’s victims in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Light brings a raw glamour that makes her characters feel both relatable and theatrical. Miglin, especially, reminds her of the women in Tennessee Williams plays: “that kind of fragility and vulnerability, and how the people and the culture preyed on women like that.”
There’s no one character type that defines Light—no particular kind of woman she typically plays. Her body of work is marked most notably by its range, something that comes naturally to her. “I don’t say, Gee, now I want to do a different character. What a good idea. That’ll be good for my career. I never think about it like that,” she says. “I look at them, they are human beings.... I look at the inquiry that I’m about to embark on. That’s what I find exciting and interesting.”
After Impeachment, Light has a number of characteristically diverse characters queued up. She’s slated to star in the upcoming dark comedy The Menu, alongside Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes; in the upcoming Starz horror-comedy series Shining Vale; and as Blanche Knopf, cofounder of the Knopf publishing house, in the upcoming HBO Max series Julia, about the life of Julia Child.
Though they’re all different, the actor says, roles like these reflect reality, despite a culture that still tends to relegate women and female characters to tropes.
“I won’t have that—I will be vigilant to make sure that there is that kind of multidimensional [character],” says Light. “And I think we’ve said it a lot—that society does put women in boxes. We’re not allowing that anymore. We are moving from that in a very dynamic, fulsome way that is making sure that we’re not allowing that anymore. And we are calling out a system, a society, a culture that does that with women, and it’s our responsibility to speak to that.”
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