Annaleigh Ashford reacts to Paula Jones saying her Impeachment: American Crime Story portrayal is inaccurate

Vulture

Ashford tells Vulture she did a lot of preparation to play the Bill Clinton scandal figure. "Certainly all the video footage I had was outrageously helpful," says Ashford. "She’s familiar to anybody who was aware of this moment in history, so you want to make sure you’re not creating a caricature of this person — but you want to really be dead-on with her accent. Because her look was something she changed, for me, that needed to be really specific, given the way she was so brutally picked on in terms of her physical looks. That was really important. But really the most important thing in any character you’re working on is figuring out what they want." Ashford was asked about Jones' recent comments to Inside Edition, saying Ashford's portrayal makes her look "almost kind of cartoonish-y." Ashford says she didn't see the interview, adding: "There’s so much source material that I felt the producers made a very smart and wise decision in keeping with the history of American Crime Story and not reaching out to the people who are involved. The one exception, obviously, is Monica Lewinsky, because that’s a whole other narrative that was squashed: Now people know that she wasn’t allowed to speak out at all and her agency was completely taken away from her. On that note, I can understand that Paula Jones would maybe feel slighted because she didn’t get to be a part of telling her story. But I feel like there was so much source material that we told her story the best we could, and I would like to believe that we gave great empathy to this woman, and people are seeing a different dimension to her story and her narrative. I think we’re giving voice to her piece of this puzzle in a way that hasn’t been done before."