One gets the sense while interviewing Tom Hollander that this man was born to play Truman Capote. The Bristol-born actor, entering his third decade of celebrated work on stage and screen, physically transforms into the literary icon in FX’s upcoming Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, a performance that ranges from playful to profound as it slowly swerves toward tragedy. But even without the stylish hat or sassy head tilt, without the voice that reaches oh so high, a Capote-esque twinkle still flickers in Hollander’s eyes—a sharply cutting wit, a love for dishy chitchat, a singular way with words.

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

It turns out that, for Hollander, this moment was decades in the making. He first put himself in the mix to play Truman Capote in the mid-2000s, when two biopics were in simultaneous development: the eponymous Philip Seymour Hoffman vehicle that won Hoffman an Oscar, and the relatively unsung Infamous starring Toby Jones. After auditioning for the latter, Hollander felt defeated when he didn’t get the role. While on the precipice of a larger breakthrough—the same year as Capote’s release, Hollander scored raves for his outrageous turn as Mr. Collins in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice, and he’s more recently won awards for TV work in The Night Manager and The White Lotus—he wondered at the time why he wasn’t good enough. He certainly didn’t expect to get another shot.

The Swans makes a compelling argument that the wait was worth it. The series, developed by Emmy winner Jon Robin Baitz (Brothers & Sisters) and helmed by Oscar nominee Gus Van Sant, offers a fresh look at Capote later in life, as he leads a sort of bitterly, lavishly catty existence among powerful Manhattan housewives including Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), and C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny). When Capote publishes an excerpt of his upcoming novel, Answered Prayers, that exposes the dark side of those women’s lives, he’s ostracized—an outcasting that carries substantial implications for a gay man in ’70s New York, and that facilitates his worsening alcoholism.

Hollander’s portrayal can edge toward camp, with a gossipy verve that sets this version apart from Hoffman’s iconic creation. But it’s the embodiment of a great man’s decline, his loneliness and sense of mortality, that lingers. You feel all of Hollander’s long, distinguished career on stage and screen in this defining performance—that this was the time for him to do it. This is also perhaps a fraught moment for an actor who does not identify as queer to take on such a part—but Hollander is not shy about unpacking the experience as a whole, or the complexity with which he relates to that aspect of Capote.

Vanity Fair: Let’s start with how this came your way. The casting director, Alexa Fogel, brings you in and then—

Tom Hollander: I did a Zoom with Ryan [Murphy] and Gus and Robbie Bates, and we had a charming chat. Gus didn’t say anything. Robbie said a lot. Gus—very watchful. Robbie, I’d met in the south of France about 15 years before, so that was kind of amazing, to see him again in that context. They were very friendly. Ryan did an impression of Truman Capote, which was disconcerting. I had already done my impression, I think, in the Zoom with Alexa, so it was too late. And then they offered it to me. It felt like they’d decided that I was their guy before. So Alexa was just leading me through going, “Don’t fuck it up.” There was another actor in [my] house when I was auditioning who’d come around for lunch, and he had also auditioned for Truman Capote.

For this project?

For this project, yeah, and he was unable to contain his competitiveness. Just as I was going up to do the Zoom with Alexa, he went, “Are you going to do your Capote voice?”—in his Capote voice, to me across the room. I went, what the fuck? Anyway, I’m not telling you who it was.

There’s a bar you have to clear in a Truman Capote audition. It’s not like auditioning for other parts. How confident did you feel that you could hit those notes and get the voice right? What kind of work did you do to make it through that stage?

I actually haven’t told anyone this: So I had auditioned for Truman Capote 20 years before and not got it. Remember, there were two films at the same time? I auditioned for the other one.

The non–Philip Seymour Hoffman one.

Yeah. So I’d been through this before 20 years ago, and it was astonishing to me that as an actor sometimes things come ‘round again—it’s funny in a way, if you stay at the craps table long enough, your number comes up. 20 years ago I’d gone, “Oh, what did I do wrong? I must have blown it. I must have done the voice wrong! I wasn’t concentrating enough. I didn’t learn my lines properly.” This time I tried less hard. That’s my confession. I’m not even sure that I told Alexa or Ryan that.

Was there a reason you didn’t tell them that?

Well, that’s a very good question—because it was a defeat, I suppose. I certainly wouldn’t have told them at the beginning, because I was finding my feet and I didn’t want anyone to smell fear. And then honestly, by the time we were a few weeks in, I was so involved in the whole thing it didn’t even occur to me. It only occurred to me again now when you asked. I vividly remember not getting it the first time. Anyway, fun.

It sounds like you’re glad it happened when it happened.

There’s a funny thing about acting. I don’t think there are that many professions you can get necessarily better at. Aren’t mathematicians supposed to be at their best when they’re about 17? Obviously sports people, the same. It’s all over by the time they’re 30. But there are actors—if they’re lucky, if they can keep going and they don’t get sick and they get the opportunities—where life makes you better. The experience of living, I mean. It gives you a broader emotional range. Perhaps that’s not the case for all actors, but I think it’s true for me.

You play this moment in Capote’s life with a little camp, a little flair, but it’s also very tragic. What did you connect to here?

I do like playing failures. It’s so human. If you think of an actor, actors are often playing people who are extraordinary, who are really brilliant at something. To play a hero is quite difficult because few of us are actually heroes. Truman was a drunk, and he blew it. I’ve been around that stuff enough in my life to have a sense of what it smells like—the alcoholism—and this is a story about alcoholism. It’s about addiction. I mean, the canvas is big, isn’t it? The canvas is enormous.

There were many things. Truman was funny. It’s better if your Truman is a shorter actor, unless you are CGI-ing the whole thing, and they weren’t CGI-ing it. I’ve had a literary education, so I’m not too scared of a long and complicated line. And I’ve done enough stage. All of these things mean that I was good casting. Oh, and I think [costar] Joe Mantello also was an advocate for me playing the part. I’d met Joe and Robbie when I was younger, both of them together. They were a couple at that point.

How did you find them when you met them? Where were you in your life at that point?

We were on a holiday. We all felt that we were young and we were the jeunesse dorée at that point. We were on a glamorous holiday in the south of France. We were in the same house, and we were careless and reckless with ourselves. Then we regrouped in middle age to tell this sad story, so everyone’s lived long enough to see people fall by the wayside. Our own contemporaries fall by the wayside, lose control, destroy themselves. It all becomes very poignant as you realize how fragile everything is.

From the Archive: Capote’s Swan Dive

The story’s impetus is when Capote publishes the Esquire excerpt that exposes the ugly side of Swans’ lives. His own life is essentially destroyed after that. You’re watching, thinking the whole time, Why did he do it? Were you asking yourself that?

He must have been in a state of denial, and to have published Answered Prayers in Esquire—in today’s parlance you’d say drunk when he pressed send on the email to the editor. But what was he doing at that point? Was that arrogance? The Swans, however difficult their lives were and however much we see their loneliness and how they are trapped in gilded cages, they’re not outsiders. They are the in-gang, the in-crowd. They’re the Mean Girls of the Upper East Side. And Truman is fundamentally an outsider—that’s why he’s interesting subject matter. Tell me if this is pretentious, and you could also disagree because I don’t really know, but I think there’s some sort of—in British history, it’s Oscar Wilde. Truman is a bit of an Oscar Wilde. He’s a martyr to the gay experience in the 20th century—and the 19th century, obviously with Oscar Wilde—when it was impossible. I think that’s why he wrote that thing and why he maybe thought he was going to get away with it.

I know you’ve been asked about playing gay characters before. As you were saying with Truman, this time period and milieu are very specific, and form a lot of who he was. What do you make of the current conversations around the importance of people who do identify as queer or gay playing a part where, as you were saying, a really particular kind of queer experience is intrinsic to the character?

I have been asked to play several gay characters over the years. I’ve played Bosie [Dogulas] against Oscar Wilde, I’ve played Guy Burgess, I played the character in The White Lotus. People keep asking me to do it because apparently when I play these characters, it’s believable. And that’s, in a way, where my job begins and ends. If people don’t believe it when they watch you, it’s the most difficult thing in the world, if it doesn’t work. If it works, then it works. For some reason, who I am, who I am as a person allows me to present as gay. Yeah, sometimes I do present as gay. I mean, I always did, so—

You mean in your personal life?

As a person? I do, yeah. I’m somebody that walks into a room and there are some people who walk into the room, you go, “Well, they’re not gay,” and, “They are gay.” My own sexuality is sufficiently liberal to have encompassed many different experiences, which are not anyone’s business. I certainly have not lived the life that gay men used to have to live. I have not lived that difficulty. I have not had to live in the shadows and been under the threat of going to jail for expressing my sexuality. As an actor, you have to be able to imagine something and do it with seriousness and take it seriously, approach it with sufficient sort of solemnity and plausibility, and then you imaginatively put yourself into those shoes. That’s what it is. I mean, it’s true of playing any part. You are rarely playing yourself. You are always pretending to be something that you are not. That’s on the tin of being an actor. You want to dig into it further?

I appreciate the answer, unless you feel that you want to share anything else.

There are issues about representation. There are types of actors that have not been given sufficient chances to play great parts. All of these things are in the process of being revised and improved and changed, and that’s all absolutely right. At the same time as that movement is happening, what shouldn’t be sacrificed is the sort of basic fundamental principle of actors being able to play things that they are not necessarily, because then that’s not art. If an actor’s body is their canvas, my body is my tool—the painter uses a canvas, the actor uses their own body—so within that definition of acting, there has to be the possibility of transformation. And sometimes the most interesting, creative work comes from where somebody who is not something is coming up against it, and it’s the fizz of that—the joining of two that makes it interesting.

So what did that look like for you? What was your relationship to Capote’s work, and were you reading a lot of him in the lead-up to this?

Not as much as I should, I should be able to say, yes, I read every word, but… When we were doing it, literally, my day was spent learning the lines, the weekends were learning the lines, the evenings were learning the lines, and the days were shooting them. I’d read Other Voices, Other Rooms and In Cold Blood when I was young, and I remembered them, and I’d read a few of the short stories. And Music for Chameleons, I read just before we started. But I’m no authority on Truman Capote. I think I’ve read enough of him to have a sense of how good he was.

But in terms of what I know about him as a man, it’s what we did in this show, which has kind of come through what Robbie knows of him. I’m the actor. I’m the vessel through which all their work and their assimilation of the different elements gets presented. I just try and embody what they have created. It was beyond Truman, probably, at some point. I don’t think we should be thinking of it as a biopic. The biopics were those two films; this is taking him as a sort of mythical figure that you can do stuff with tonally.

What was it like to get into the role every day? Some of your co-stars have said they feel like they met you, Tom, only after filming wrapped.

I had an amazing team around me, without whom I would’ve had a collapse of some sort. Jerome Butler, my voice coach, was a wing man and sort of just buddy and brilliant collaborator, who helped me find the voice and was always there. Polly Bennett is a movement person who I’ve worked with before in the theater, and a couple of times she came over for a bit and helped me. We had fun working out what my version of Truman could be physically, to find a language for that. And then you learn the lines. Then I imagine saying the lines as me, and you try and sort of blur yourself with the character. What I couldn’t do playing this part was look at it. I couldn’t watch myself. I couldn’t look at the monitor because I found it literally physically nauseating to watch myself. He’s a very, very singular guy, Truman Capote. The ideal scenario is to be sitting completely still. beautifully lit with a cigarette doing a little pose. And then I can watch it and I go, okay, that looks fine. But Truman is too active, too mobile, too vocally extraordinary for me to watch it.

I don’t always hate watching myself, but in this, I did. It was not helpful to look at it. I had to stay in it, and I had to let the [inner] child go, “I’m going to pretend I’m Truman Capote, and now I’m walking into a restaurant and I’m going to do it, and I’m going to put the hat on and I’m going to do it and every day.” I had to do that. I was like a kid with a dressing-up box.

This interview has been edited and condensed.