‘LINKED’

By giving Monica Lewinsky a voice, Beanie Feldstein may redefine her own

Beanie Feldstein was halfway through a 10-month odyssey into the mind of Monica Lewinsky this past spring when, at a Los Angeles traffic light, the actress looked to her right, caught a glimpse of a middle-aged brunette in a turning car and convinced herself she had just spotted the real-life counterpart to her on-screen character.

“My partner looked at me with so much pity,” Feldstein says of her girlfriend, film producer Bonnie Chance Roberts. “She was like, `Bean, all you think about all day is Monica. You eat, sleep, breathe, brush your teeth — you do everything thinking about Monica. Not every woman with dark hair in L.A. is Monica.' ”

Roberts had a point. The task of playing Lewinsky in the FX limited series Impeachment: American

Crime Story, which premiered earlier this month, had plunged Feldstein into Monica mania. When she wasn't on set, Feldstein was dissecting the transcripts from Lewinsky's grand jury testimony, listening to the infamous Linda Tripp tapes and poring over the biography Monica's Story, which she carried in her backpack every day for two years after booking the role.

Even Feldstein's playlist was packed with music Lewinsky enjoyed in the late '90s, at the time of her affair with U.S. President Bill Clinton and his subsequent impeachment (think the Rent and Les Miserables cast albums). But that immersion only made Feldstein more confident in her convictions. So she texted Lewinsky — whom she had seen in person just once, a year earlier — to ask if that had been the former White House intern hanging a right in Southern California traffic.

Feldstein remembers anticipation, then affirmation — “That was me,” Lewinsky responded.

“She drove by in, like, 0.5 seconds, and she was wearing sunglasses,” Feldstein recalls. “So there was zero basis. But I was like, `I would know her anywhere.' I'm an extension of her, she's an extension of me. It was very funny — we're very cosmically linked at this point.”

“We'll know each other for always,” Lewinsky adds in an email with Post, “and I'm a lucky person for that.”

While Impeachment sets out to redefine tired perceptions of Lewinsky, who as a young woman was subjected to gaslighting, legal pressure and media mockery because of her relationship with Clinton, Feldstein finds herself amid a reinvention of her own. As a Broadway belter and indie comedy darling — lauded for high-school films Lady Bird and Booksmart — the 28-yearold sings a different tune while channelling Lewinsky's torment in the Ryan Murphyproduced drama series.

“Well, I'm not next to a locker, which is brand new for me,” Feldstein says during a late August video chat from her parents' Los Angeles home. “But as everyone does, I am getting older and more mature, so I think I surprised myself with this. Because my mission has been to honour Monica's experience, I had to go to deeper places than I've ever been asked to go on-screen.”

Feldstein largely shares the screen with Clive Owen as Clinton and Sarah Paulson as Tripp, the Pentagon employee who secretly recorded calls with Lewinsky and submitted the tapes to independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

Although Impeachment's 10 episodes examine myriad key players from Clinton's impeachment, and use the saga to interrogate broader issues of partisan politics, a sensationalized media landscape and pre-#MeToo power dynamics, Feldstein's rendition of Lewinsky is the empathetic centre of the maelstrom. That focus heaped responsibility on the actress, who points out that her 23-day shooting schedule for the sixth episode alone — a Murphydirected pressure cooker in which a frightened Lewinsky spends the day at the Pentagon City mall under the watch of FBI agents and independent counsel lawyers — nearly equalled the 25 days in which she filmed Booksmart.

A child when the impeachment scandal unfolded, Feldstein acknowledges she had a rudimentary understanding of the events when she was staying in London in June 2019, got a call from an unknown American number, and answered to hear Murphy offering her the part of Lewinsky and a producer role. But as Feldstein gleaned the public impressions of Lewinsky, who also serves as a producer on the show, she discovered “a false and flat and unkind portrait of a very young person who deserved better.”

“What I loved most about Monica at that time — obviously, this was 24 years ago — was she was a bundle of complexities,” Feldstein explains. “She was super savvy and yet really wide-eyed. She was very confident and yet very insecure. And she's all of these in equal parts.”

So Feldstein leaped at the opportunity to give a voice to a public figure who, because of the immunity deal with Starr's office, was handcuffed in her ability to speak out. Feldstein also picked up on parallels between Lewinsky's upbringing and her own — they're both Jewish, both grew up in West L.A. and both were theatre kids — and related to the idea of a fresh-out-ofcollege woman stumbling her way through the world.

“Beanie managed to capture not only a unique period of time for young adults — when you've reached that exalted status of `adulthood' and think you know everything about how the world works and are keen to flex your independence muscles — but also a time for me, personally, where I straddled naivete and savviness, innocence and sexual agency, and depth but not maturity,” Lewinsky says, noting the Pentagon City scenes as especially evocative. “The end of that episode was so real for me in her portrayal (that) I sobbed.”

Impeachment: American Crime Story airs Tuesdays on FX.