Despite the ’90s nostalgia, the elaborate wigs, and the occasional knowing jokes about the political future to come, Impeachment: American Crime Story is not exactly a fun show—it is, after all, the chronicle of a deeply traumatizing time in a young woman’s life, made with her participation.
But if anyone was having a good time when the Bill Clinton impeachment saga was playing out, it was certainly Ann Coulter. The conservative pundit made her name in the wake of the Clinton scandal with her first book, 1998’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. And as Impeachment: American Crime Story lays out, she was involved in the conservative efforts to promote Paula Jones’s lawsuit against the president, meeting nightly with the “elves” who worked out legal strategies to keep Jones’s suit going. The show’s version of Coulter, played by Cobie Smulders in a mile-long blonde wig and array of skintight dresses, walks into every room armed with zingers and visible disdain for the president. “The law lets him slide, the press lets him slide,” she says in the show’s third episode. “Even Nixon was capable of shame. But after this just think what kind of flabby con men will see a path to the White House.”
The third episode of Impeachment also finds Coulter at a Washington cocktail party meeting Matt Drudge, sizing him up with the merciless line, “Nice hat. Is it serious?” On this week’s episode of the Still Watching podcast, Smulders tells Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich that she came away from her research on Coulter with the sense that “she loves to play with people. I think she’s a very intelligent person and I think she likes to play and manipulate situations.” And, for whatever reason, she never enters a room without a drink in her hand.
Listen to this week’s episode of Still Watching, in which Katey Rich, Richard Lawson, and Joanna Robinson break down the show’s third episode, “Not to Be Believed,” and look back at the conservative media that was just starting at the time, and remains with us today. Below, find a partial transcript of the Cobie Smulders interview.
You can submit questions to be read on the show to stillwatchingpod@gmail.com, and subscribe to Still Watching at Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Vanity Fair: What are your memories from this period? I think you were fairly young, you were living in Canada, so you might not have been as closely involved in following the story as some other people, but what do you remember from this entire scandal?
Cobie Smulders: Honestly, not much. I think I was still in high school, I was 16, 17. And in Canada, not to say that this story didn’t reach Canada, because it certainly did, but I think I got more of my knowledge about it through pop culture, through like the SNL sketches that they did. I knew like the headlines, like I knew about the blue dress, like I have Monica very clearly in my brain from that time from newspapers and magazines, but not understanding the complexity of the story at all.
I think a lot of us who were young women then look back now and think, wow, that story really shaped a lot of how we thought about women’s bodies and sex. Did you have that experience?
I don’t think I understood the sex of it. And what’s been fascinating to me is being in the show and just being a viewer of this show is how detailed—like all the details that came out about their sexual relationship was so out there to like kind of a disgusting degree. So I didn’t take any of that, in which is fascinating to me. The fact that that got out and was publicized is a bigger thing than the act itself. That somebody would be willing to print that in the news media is shocking to me.
And that’s the bigger violation.
Exactly. And they went after Monica, they judged her and her body and her looks. Women thought Bill Clinton was like such a fox. Like he was such an attractive president to a lot of people. I was not looking at the president that way as a 16-year-old Canadian girl. But I think too, with like a quite a large majority of American women and women in general, he was seen as quite an attractive man. So I think that people villainized Monica extremely and it’s also interesting to see the way the differences the way the media is from media now.
Can you imagine something like this happening now? I mean, we would be watching live feeds of these moments, like it’s just a different time. And so I think one of the great things about this show is I think we’re hearing a lot of like, why are we rehashing this? And I think it’s because there’s so many details that people didn’t even know. They didn’t even know about because there wasn’t the opportunity either for that person to tell their side of things, or it wasn’t covered in the same way as equally I think as it would be now.
So your husband, Taran Killam, had gotten involved in the show prepandemic, production shuts down, doesn’t start for a while. And then you kind of come in much later to play Ann Coulter. So when he was preparing for it, had you already kind of enmeshed yourself in this history via him? Were you already thinking about the Clinton era before you signed on for this?
I was a little bit certainly talking to him just about, because if I didn’t know much about the Monica Lewinsky of at all, I certainly did not know anything about the Paula Jones too, which started it all. So it was just talking to him about that portion of it we got into a little bit. I don’t think I read any of the scripts, but it was just interesting talking to him about that relationship.
It’s been really cool to watch the show as an audience member and seeing these more human moments developed between like Linda Tripp and Monica. It’s so interesting to take something that is just a bizarre time in history and there’s so many pieces to it, but then to break it down and try to understand the human motivation behind it is it has been interesting to see unfold.
Well, and that’s what’s so interesting about Ann Coulter here, I think, because you’re finding her at this point in where she’s not this huge deal that she’s going to become later. She’s kind of trying to establish herself. You see her as a human being which I think in her career, she’s kind of like embraced being a villain. Like she doesn’t really try to be seen as human being. I assume that challenge you’re given is to kind of peel back on that.
It is. I think it’s also the version that we do see of her is a version of her that’s in front of an audience, whether that’s literal or a camera. And I think that really through this time she saw an opportunity similar to Matt Drudge. They both saw this opportunity and sort of space for them in the conservative media to create this new career. I mean, she wrote a New York Times best-selling book about this journey for her. And that kind of launched her into a different category and people became interested in hearing what she had to say. So it’s an interesting time for her. It’s like the beginning for her, I’m sure there’s a lot more before it. And I think when you get to see these characters in scenes where they’re with their friends, or I think in every scene she’s drinking. I don’t know if it humanizes her, but I think it’s just seeing this human under these circumstances with friends, rather than poised and eloquent and ready for combat and in front of the video camera.
You kind of also sense like she’s walking to a party with George Conway. She has her line about Laura Ingraham. You feel like she’s performing for him, even though there’s not really an audience. Like you kind of see the seeds of it.
I think the way I see her—and I have not met her and I don’t know her personally at all. So this is just what I’ve created via reading about her, reading her own work and watching her speak, is I think she loves to play with people. I think she’s a very intelligent person and I think she likes to play and manipulate situations.
And I think that initially I was like, I don’t know how to do Coulter. I don’t know who this person is. And when I tapped into that, and even I think at the beginning before when I got hired and when I was talking to producers and to Sarah Burgess, the head writer on this was, she’s really the only one who gets to have a good time.
I feel like Linda Tripp’s kind of having a weirdly dark good time, but Coulter’s having a blast. She’s not like this could blow up, it doesn’t affect her. She’s got no skin in the game. She’s just kind of puppeting people. And so when I tapped into that, I was like, oh, that’s interesting especially in terms of giving the show another color.
It was kind of like, oh, okay. I can wrap my brain around that. Because listen, yes, she wants to see Bill Clinton impeached and that is important to her. But like, how does this accelerate her own career? Like, will it make it, will it not, I don’t know. But it’s just in the moment of like, let’s just play around and let’s just enjoy ourselves because this is insane. So when I tapped into that, that was a helpful direction to go into for a lot of those scenes. And also just always have a bottle of wine I suppose.
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