Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to episode 171 of Awards Chatter,

The Hollywood Reporters Awards Podcast,

presented by the iconic Empire Hotel

on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

I'm the host Scott Feinberg,

and my guest today is one of the most revered actresses of her generation.

A five-time Oscar nominee who won Best Actress in 1996 for her portrayal of a nun who

befriends a man on death row in Dead Man Walking, and a seven-time Emmy nominee who is

nominated this year for Feud, Betty and Joan, both for Best Variety Series, as a producer of the

FX hit, and Best Actress in a limited series or movie

for her portrayal of Betty Davis on it, the one and only Susan Surrandon.

Surandon, who is a very youthful 70, has been in the business for 47 years.

She stumbled into it quite by accident, never fully bought into it, but undeniably has made

her mark on it.

You know her from 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show,

1978's Pretty Baby, 1981's Atlantic City, 1983's The Hunger, 1988's Bull Durham,

1990's White Palace, 1991 Stelman Louise. Hunger, 1998 Step-M. 2007's Enchanted, 2011's Jeff who lives at home, 2015's The Medler, and so many other

memorable projects on the big screen. But like many other actresses of her generation, she increasingly has found film work to be wanting as she's gotten older and has become more open to the idea of doing television, on which she's appeared in TV movies such as 2007's Bernard and Doris and 2010's You Don't

know Jack.

But Surrandon had never participated in a limited series for television until Ryan Murphy came

calling about feud and convinced her to play Davis, a part she previously had been asked to play many times over the years, including by Davis herself, but always had feared and resisted.

The result of her overcoming that anxiety and

...