Kim Kardashian’s ‘American Horror Story’ Performance Is Proof of Her Comeback
28.09.2023 - 15:03
/ variety.com
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Kim Kardashian’s performance on the current season of “American Horror Story,” two episodes in, could be described as thrillingly competent. As Siobhan (sure!), a power publicist who is determined to get her actor client, played by Emma Roberts, everything she wants, Kardashian leverages her rapacious ambition.
She directs it outward, determined to get for someone else all the fame that the real-life Kardashian has found for herself. Siobhan’s steeliness and her capability for cutting wit come through in jagged-edge one-liners, to which Kardashian’s affect and her presence lend a bit of topspin.
“You on a bad day,” she tells her client, a would-be star who is struggling to convey her personality despite a botched talk-show appearance, “is like Hilary Swank on a great one.” (Ouch.) The second episode featured a slightly brutal Jamie Lee Curtis read, rendered into Hollywoodese by Kardashian — a performer who could have fit right into Robert Altman’s “The Player,” were it updated for 2023. It’s in Kardashian’s sublime flatness, her ability to convey that this meanness comes naturally, that the humor lies.
In the most recent episode, her gaze penetrated through even through Roberts’ character’s onstage breakdown at an awards ceremony, somehow both horrified and unsurprised at this latest collapse for her particular black swan. Is it reinventing the wheel, or matching the heights of women who once occupied Ryan Murphy’s repertory company? No one would confuse Kim Kardashian for Sarah Paulson.
But she’s also asked to do somewhat less like transformation, and something more like playful persona manipulation. (It’s somewhat akin to how the show deployed Lady Gaga in her “Hotel” season, as a fame
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