Sarah Paulson Started Craving Cigarettes After Playing Marcia Clark

Sarah Paulson could eventually win an Emmy for playing Marcia Clark in The People v. O.J. Simpson, but it doesn't seem the part has done her lungs any favors. Paulson may have picked up Clark’s smoking habit, the actress confessed to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. Though Paulson said she doesn’t “smoke at all in life,” she had to get the hang of it for the series. It was rough going at first. “When we first started, I was coughing a lot, and then eventually I started to kind of — I was ready for a smoke,” she said. “It got me a little crazy for the ciggies.” At the time, she was also smoking for her role on American Horror Story, so she was doing double duty. But was she lighting up real tobacco cigarettes? On the smoking-heavy Mad Men, for instance, the actors puffed herbal ones. Maybe Paulson was just really method about the whole thing. According to a recent profile in The Hollywood Reporter, Clark herself no longer chain-smokes.