The official candy-and-costumes holiday may be over, but Halloween is a daily happening for Alexandra Breckenridge.
By Jason Merritt, Getty Images
Alexandra Breckenridge stars in the new FX hit ‘American Horror Story.’
Alexandra Breckenridge stars in the new FX hit ‘American Horror Story.’
The 29-year-old actress puts on a sexy maid’s outfit and turns on the charm — usually to Dylan McDermott— on the scaretastic FX drama American Horror Story (Wednesdays 10 p.m. ET/PT) as the younger version of the ghostly redheaded servant, Moira.
Only certain characters see Breckenridge’s Moira, though, like McDermott’s philandering psychologist Ben Harmon. Everybody else views her as an older lady, as played by Frances Conroy (who is exactly twice as old as Breckenridge).
Moira is one of many interesting ghosts that haunt the “murder house” occupied by Ben and his pregnant wife Vivien (Connie Britton), from a teenage school-shooter to Ben’s baby-carrying mistress to a pair of gay party planners — not to mention the mystery masked man in the rubber suit that might have impregnated Vivien and whom Breckenridge lovingly refers to as “the Rubber Man.”
Audiences have been introduced to all these weirdos amid lots of blood, gore and other frightful tropes of the genre.
“That’s the thing: By the time you get to Halloween after working on a show like this, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah. Ghosts and goblins and costumes.’ You’re nonplussed about the whole thing,” Breckenridge says.
In Wednesday’s episode, the Harmons amp up their efforts to sell the house ASAP, and young Moira seduces a prospective buyer. Usually, Ben is the target of her come-hither-looks, and it’s McDermott’s goofiness that Breckenridge appreciates most when filming those scenes.
“It’s so needed,” she says. “Some of these sexy-type scenes we have to do, they get so intense. If you can’t have a sense of humor about it, what are you doing?”
Breckenridge concedes those sequences are particularly difficult because, “I am such a dork,” she says, laughing. “I’ve never acted like that in my life. I don’t think many people have.
“I just thought, ‘What do I think a man would find sexy?’ I tried to do that. It seems to be working OK. I mean, I haven’t gotten Dylan in bed yet on the show, but you know.”
She didn’t go to her male friends for advice. In fact, most of her pals, both men and women, were “extremely confused” when they first saw her on the show.
“Half of them came to me and said, ‘Wow, you’re actually really sexy on the show!’ And I said, ‘Thank you?’ And they said, ‘No, I see you as being such a dork. I was surprised,’ ” Breckenridge says.
Exactly how dorky is she? “I’m refurbishing a dollhouse right now,” she says. “I had a friend come over and tell me, ‘Don’t ever show a potential boyfriend this because they will run in the opposite direction,’ ” says the actress, who also is a fan of the original Star Trek series and other vintage science fiction.
“I think I’m the only girl I know who watches the old Planet of the Apes. Pretty dorky.”
Acting is only one of many creative pursuits the Connecticut native has had over the years. After moving to Los Angeles when she was 10, partly because her mother thought the climate would help with her severe asthma (“I’ve not had asthma since. It went away completely,” she says), Breckenridge took up photography, theater and music in her teen years.
“One day, I just thought, well, I can’t be a musician and an actor, so I have to pick one because I’m never going to get good at one if I do both,” she says. “I decided to be an actor because if I was a musician, I’d have to get a band together and that just sounded like a big pain .”
Breckenridge, who often does voices for the Fox animated series Family Guy and appeared in True Blood, still harbors a fantasy of one day being a jazz singer. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have the chops she used to have due to lack of practice, and she’s also not crazy about singing for people.
“It depends on how close of a friend they are,” she says with a laugh. “If I can dork out in front of them, it’s fine.”
(For the record, she’s not that tight with McDermott yet. “We’ve been in some pretty compromising situations so I feel rather close to him at this point, but I still wouldn’t sing in front of him.”)
Those friends of hers often hit her up for American Horror Story secrets, and Breckenridge is taunting them about the identity of the Rubber Man, which she recently found out. (She says everybody will know within a few weeks.)
The show was renewed for a second season, which Breckenridge took as potentially good news for her, since character death seems to go hand in hand with increased job security.
“You have no idea what could happen: Somebody could die at any second, but the good thing is if they die, then they’re probably sticking around for a while,” Breckenridge says.
“If you don’t die on American Horror Story, you’re probably not coming back.”
