🎧 The Year Julianne Nicholson Broke Bad

The Emmy winner and current double nominee for ‘Paradise’ and ‘Hacks’ tells me about her trips to the dark side

SPLIT SCREEN “It’s always exciting to be thought of in a new and different light,” Julianne Nicholson tells me. (JC Olivera/Getty Images)

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If you ask Julianne Nicholson, “there are some really nice people out there” in Hollywood. That’s maybe not the takeaway you’d expect from someone with 30 years of experience in the industry, having done her time in a lot of underseen TV roles — did you catch her in the later seasons of Ally McBeal, or maybe on Law & Order: Criminal Intent?— and as a key supporting player in a vast range of films, from Kinsey in 2004 to The Amateur earlier this year. It’s the kind of career that allows you to be a fly on the wall for all types of bad star and executive behavior, or at least to be looked over in favor of the names further up the call sheet.

But it’s clear that Nicholson, 54, puts out something positive that comes back to her, as in her first-ever meeting with her future Paradise co-star Sterling K. Brown. She had just won an Emmy for her supporting role opposite Kate Winslet on Mare of Easttown, and though he didn’t know Nicholson, Brown came up to offer his congratulations. “We hugged it out,” she tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “We had a really, really sweet first meeting.”

Nicholson and Brown would go on to share some incredibly intense scenes on Paradise, the Hulu drama now nominated for four Emmys, including acting nods for Nicholson, Brown and their co-star James Marsden — as well as best drama series. The premise of the show was tightly protected before it premiered in January (“I’m pretty good at secret-keeping,” says Nicholson). Still, it seems safe to say that it’s set after an apocalyptic event has wiped out much of the world’s population, while the president (Marsden), his advisors and some lucky citizens hide out in an underground bunker.

That bunker was the brainchild of Nicholson’s character, nicknamed “Sinatra,” a billionaire with close ties to the present who may or may not deliberately resemble some real-life characters. As I tell Nicholson, in our conversation, the moment where Sinatra stands at the edge of a massive underground dig site and declares, “Build me my city!” is when I fully fell in love with Paradise. It’s the first time Nicholson has played a villain, but it turns out, it wouldn’t be the last, even in this TV season.

A few months after filming on Paradise wrapped, Nicholson left her home in the U.K. to return to Los Angeles for a guest appearance on Hacks, for which she earned a second Emmy nomination this year. On the HBO Max comedy, Nicholson plays the fictional TikTok star Dance Mom, a character who appears at first to be guileless and sweet, but is quickly poisoned by a lavish, drug-fueled Hollywood lifestyle. It’s quite a spectacle, to put it mildly.

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So what does it take to pull off such wildly different characters and manage to surprise audiences this far into her career? Nicholson — who grew up in Massachusetts, before attending college at New York’s Hunter College — tells me about all of it, plus how she can tell when interviewers actually like her shows, on this special Saturday edition of the podcast.

Don’t forget that you can join us for even more awards season talk at Prestige Junkie After Party, where just $5 a month gets you access to bonus episodes, video versions of the main podcast (like today’s interview with Nicholson!) and Substack Live conversations — including the one I recorded yesterday with Christopher Rosen about all the biggest headlines of the week. Subscribe now to watch!