Oh, the sacrifices of being a star:
For 63 years, writer and filmmaker John Waters has spent the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the popular beach resort at the tip of Cape Cod. But he says he had to limit his time in the sun this year because of his role in “American Horror Story: 13.”
“The one thing I couldn’t do all summer is I couldn’t get a suntan, because I’d go and shoot a thing and then go back three weeks later and I’d come around a corner in a scene,” he said in an interview that aired this week on ABC’s Good Morning America. “I can’t have a suntan all of a sudden. So I was continuity-wise all summer.”
As a filmmaker, Waters is a stickler for continuity. In 2024, when he received the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award from the American Cinema Editors society, he advised directors at the awards ceremony not to have characters smoking in their movies because burning cigarettes can change too much in length.
“Never have a character smoke cigarettes in your film, even in a period piece,” he warned. “Not for health concerns, but for continuity issues. You want to snip out a boring bit of dialogue? You can’t cut back to the first smoking character because the cigarette is a different length.”
Filming for the 13 episodes of ‘AHS: 13’ began in April and wrapped up this summer. Thursday night is a big night for the cast and crew because it’s when the first three episodes will air starting at 9 p.m. ET on FX and streaming on Hulu. The final episode will air on Oct. 29.
On ‘AHS: 13,’ Waters, 80, plays Mr. Phibes, a knife-wielding “medical specialist extraordinaire” who works with Jessica Lange’s Constance Langdon character from ‘AHS Season 1: Murder House.’ As a result, he and Lange, 77, share screen time.
Waters will be in five of the season’s 13 episodes. But he said in the GMA clip taped on Wednesday that he can’t provide many details about the plot because scenes for the series were filmed in a different order from the way they’ll be shown on TV and he was only on set for filming on days when his character was involved.
“I haven’t even seen it. I don’t know what’s in it because I shot episodes out of order and everything, different scenes,” he said. “So I don’t know really what happens in it…I’m going to watch it tomorrow night like everybody else.”
