Sarah Paulson has been inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art many times — having attended five real Met Galas and one fake one while filming Ocean’s 8 — but today she is visiting simply as a civilian, a woman in search of art. “It’s funny to be here as a person just enjoying the museum,” she says on a particularly mobbed summer Friday afternoon. “You’re like, Oh, this is what it’s for. ”

To describe Paulson is to pull out all the offbeat adjectives from the back of the drawer: She’s zany and ribald and outré, telling me about her Bart Simpson–esque burps and debating what we should call boobs (“I’m certainly not saying ‘breasts.’ I know someone who says ‘bosom,’ and that’s not my favorite thing, and she knows I don’t like to hear the word. And maybe that person is Holland Taylor”).

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