How Jackie Kennedy Inspired The Politician's Would-Be First Lady
The world that The Politician—the smart, arch new Ryan Murphy-helmed series premiering this week on Netflix—takes place in might be fictional, but there’s no doubt that real life has inspired plenty of the drama. The series follows a high-school student named Payton Hobart (a devilishly charming Ben Platt) who lives in an almost Technicolor world of wealth and privilege, and who has a lifelong dream of landing in the White House.
When the series begins, he’s about to embark on the next great step in his endeavor: running for President of his Santa Barbara school in an intense campaign that wouldn’t be out of place in real world politics.
The Politician has a larger-than-life feeling that gives it some of its best moments. From the incredible homes it films in to the pitch perfect casting (including Jessica Lange, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bob Balaban, Bette Midler, and Judith Light, thank you very much) the show recalls iconic TV sagas—imagine Dynasty, Riverdale, and Succession blitzed together in a Vitamix—with a wink and a sharply raised eyebrow. No wonder a second season is already in the works.
When it comes to the election, Payton’s game plan includes campaign staff, competitive intelligence, down-and-dirty scheming, and perhaps most important of all a perfect First Lady. As his girlfriend Alice, Julia Schlaepfer has the chance to not only go nose to nose with Platt in some of the show’s most exciting scenes, but she also gets to channel spouses who’ve done actual time on the campaign trail and by a president’s side to properly nail the couple’s relationship.
Here, Schlaepfer tells T&C about her own high-school government experience, the First Ladies she had in mind filming the series, and how The Politician tackles the college-admissions scandal.
The series was already written and filmed before the recent brouhaha over college admissions fixing was exposed, but it’s a concept that looms large on the series. Were you totally floored to see ideas from The Politician play out in real life?
Absolutely! I think we've all been pretty gob smacked; we almost can't believe that it's been happening this way—but I also I think that that's the brilliance of Ryan Murphy. He saw this world, especially in our current political state, and wanted to examine it in this satirical way. What’s funny is that a lot of the satire is coming true
And there are other aspects that feel informed by actual events. For example, the relationship Alice has with Payton—they’re dating, yes, but they’ve also got a political partnership—feels rooted in people we know.
Because Alice and Payton go through so much together and she has to endure so much on behalf of him, I needed to understand how she was going to do that. My character was described as young Hillary Clinton in the script, so that's where I started my research. I watched a lot of videos of a young Hillary supporting her husband at his speeches, just to see her body language to try and understand her motivation and drive.
There’s also some Jackie Onassis to her. Alice is so smart and could do so much more than just being someone’s girlfriend or wife, and I think that people really saw that in Jackie O. That's part of why they idolized her, right? Because she was this incredible woman who was a bit more behind the scenes, and people wanted to know about that.
Were you the student government type in your own high school?
I was a part of something at my school called the judicial committee. They chose one student from each grade to be on this committee of jurors, and if a student got in trouble, they would come to us and then we would hear what they had to say, discuss amongst ourselves, decide what their punishment would be.
And what was it about this particular series and this particular character that spoke to you?
First of all, Ryan Murphy. He's a genius and I think his shows are always so relevant and ahead of their time, especially this one. I was just so excited by the complexity of it all. Then, in terms of the character, the person I'm playing out is so brilliant, and you don't get a lot of scripts where characters are so smart—especially the female characters. I was excited to make her human amongst the craziness of the political world that she's a part of.
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