Lizzy Caplan Faces Down Fame: How She Hit Her Stride With ‘Fatal Attraction’ and ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’
Lizzy Caplan isn’t interested in fame. Actually, she’s a little turned off by it. “I don’t know how people do that and don’t go completely insane,” she says. “The pressure is wild — pressure to look a certain way, or that every single thing you’re saying is being dissected. I just want to pretend to be other people for a living.”That’s not to say that the actress, whose career began in 1999 with a role on “Freaks and Geeks,” hasn’t enjoyed critical and commercial success — she earned an Emmy nomination for “Masters of Sex” in 2014, and still gets recognized daily as Janis Ian, her grungy outsider from 2004’s “Mean Girls.”When we meet over oat milk lattes and Earl Grey tea in West Hollywood, Caplan is effortlessly cool in a slouchy sweatshirt, boyfriend jeans and her hair in a neat bun, the outfit elevated by several pieces of dainty gold jewelry.Despite her aversion to notoriety, she’s found herself in somewhat of a career renaissance, with two major TV projects in the past year. In FX’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” she plays Libby, an ex-Manhattanite struggling to come to terms with her new identity as a suburban stay-at-home mom, and in Paramount+’s “Fatal Attraction,” she takes on the iconic role of femme fatale Alex Forrest, originated by Glenn Close in the 1987 film of the same name.