Sarah Paulson on Twitter meanies, saying goodbye to Lana from “AHS” and finding your inner dolphin

One of our favorite out actresses, Sarah Paulson, recently chatted with W magazine about her accomplishments over the last year and her upcoming turn in the Roundabout Theatre Company‘s production of Lanford Wilson‘s Talley’s Folly (opening at the Laura Pels Theatre on March 5). She talked about her character in the play, as well as her acclaimed turn as lesbian reporter Lana in American Horror Story and how the popularity of the show brought her back to Twitter.

You’ve been super active with tweeting to your more than 40,000 followers. What brought you back to Twitter? I had gone away from Twitter because before people had been so mean to me. Talking about my lisp and my enormous forehead and all these things. I do have a lisp, I do have a forehead I know you could land a plane on, it’s no mystery to me. I just didn’t have the skin for it. And then when American Horror Story happened people so loved Lana Winters and I felt it was a little safer somehow. And I really like to tweet my fans back when they say nice things. Because I sort of feel like they’re the ones who keep things going on. And I never in my life have felt so protective of a character [like I did of Lana]. I really cried like a baby at the end of the shooting. I didn’t want to say goodbye to her. I kept my little Lana pin [that I wore on the show], the little “L.” Which I decided was for labia, lesbian, Lana.

The big three. The big three. Because it was an all-encompassing symbol.

Do you wear it? I wear it all the time. No, I don’t.

W also asked about the origins of her now infamous dolphin impression:

I’m not going to ask you to do it now, but I’ve heard you do a very good impression of a dolphin. How did you ever discover your talent for that? Well, the story to that is sort of a bad story.

You had a really bad time at Sea World? No, it was when I was in high school, I smoked a lot of pot one night. And we were really stoned, my three best girlfriends and I, and I was like, “You know, it’s kind of like just being a dolphin!” And I just made the noise and my friends were like, ‘Oh my god. That was crazy you really do sound like a dolphin.’ And then it was something that I would just pull out every once in a while as a party trick. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it: I did it in The Other Sister; I did it on David Letterman; it’s in Studio 60; I did it on Anderson Cooper… So cannabis can further you career, I guess, help you find your inner dolphin.

Read the interview in its entirety at W magazine.com.