Despite the 90s nostalgia, the elaborate wigs, and the occasional knowing jokes about the political future to come, Impeachment: American Crime Story is not exactly a fun showit is, after all, the chronicle of a deeply traumatizing time in a young womans life, made with her participation.
But if anyone was having a good time when the Bill Clinton impeachment saga was playing out, it was certainly Ann Coulter. The conservative pundit made her name in the wake of the Clinton scandal with her first book, 1998s High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. And as Impeachment: American Crime Story lays out, she was involved in the conservative efforts to promote Paula Joness lawsuit against the president, meeting nightly with the elves who worked out legal strategies to keep Joness suit going. The shows version of Coulter, played by Cobie Smulders in a mile-long blonde wig and array of skintight dresses, walks into every room armed with zingers and visible disdain for the president. The law lets him slide, the press lets him slide, she says in the shows third episode. Even Nixon was capable of shame. But after this just think what kind of flabby con men will see a path to the White House.
The third episode of Impeachment also finds Coulter at a Washington cocktail party meeting Matt Drudge, sizing him up with the merciless line, Nice hat. Is it serious? On this weeks episode of the Still Watching podcast, Smulders tells Vanity Fairs Katey Rich that she came away from her research on Coulter with the sense that she loves to play with people. I think shes a very intelligent person and I think she likes to play and manipulate situations. And, for whatever reason, she never enters a room without a drink in her hand.
Listen to this weeks episode of Still Watching, in which Katey Rich, Richard Lawson, and Joanna Robinson break down the shows third episode, Not to Be Believed, and look back at the conservative media that was just starting at the time, and remains with us today. Below, find a partial transcript of the Cobie Smulders interview.
You can submit questions to be read on the show to stillwatchingpod@gmail.com, and subscribe to Still Watching at Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Vanity Fair: What are your memories from this period? I think you were fairly young, you were living in Canada, so you might not have been as closely involved in following the story as some other people, but what do you remember from this entire scandal?
Cobie Smulders: Honestly, not much. I think I was still in high school, I was 16, 17. And in Canada, not to say that this story didnt reach Canada, because it certainly did, but I think I got more of my knowledge about it through pop culture, through like the SNL sketches that they did. I knew like the headlines, like I knew about the blue dress, like I have Monica very clearly in my brain from that time from newspapers and magazines, but not understanding the complexity of the story at all.
See the rest here:
Cobie Smulders Learned to Play Impeachments Ann Coulter as the Only One Who Gets to Have a Good Time - Vanity Fair