Ryan Murphy’s latest FX anthology series, Feud, may have just ended last night, but that doesn’t mean he’s not already looking to the future at the next adaptation of the series. Murphy talked with Entertainment Weekly to dissect the finale and look toward season two, which will focus on the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
Murphy said his inspiration for doing the feud between Bette Davis (who was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in the show) and Joan Crawford (who was portrayed by Jessica Lange) was because “I was really interested in telling a story of women working against the system in Hollywood and shining a spotlight on sexism and misogyny and gender wage differences.”
Murphy said that he thinks the feuding between Davis and Crawford on the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ended up staying with the two actresses for the rest of their career and that both of them started to resent the feud.
He added that Davis eventually learned that Crawford wasn’t entirely the person that Davis thought she was, instead finding out (from Faye Dunaway, no less) that Crawford was a caring person.
He also touched on the scene in the episode where Crawford had a hallucination of a conversation between herself, Davis, Jack Warner and Hedda Hopper (a gossip columnist who stirred up trouble between Davis and Crawford), saying they added in that scene when people who were close to Crawford at the time of her death said she was hallucinating because of her cancer. But the main reason he put the scene in the finale was because he “wanted to give the audience something that Joan and Bette actually did not have: a sense of closure … Obviously that conversation never happened, but it could have happened in Crawford’s imagination. Also, it was inspired in part by the fact that Bette Davis said she had regrets.”
As for the upcoming installment of Feud, Murphy said he’s writing the next installment with Jon Robin Baitz and Ned Martel and said that it will be “super juicy.” He also said that many people are wanting to play Diana and that he’s keeping an open mind of who will play Diana. As of now, there’s no cast announcements yet, but he did say that the show is in the process of casting.