Ryan Murphy said that producers initially were not sure if they could do the trick and worked really hard to accomplish the look of Sarah Paulson's role.
"Most people who do conjoined twins do something where they connect them at the chest and you historically have two actors playing those different parts," Murphy said a conference call this week. "I really wanted Sarah to be both roles because I thought that would be more challenging. We did a test early on that was good, but I didn't love it. I thought if we kept working on it, it would get better - and it did."
To create the very different Tattler sisters, the production took a mold of Paulson's head and had two prosthetic heads built - one for Dot and another for Bette.
"So when Sarah is doing her coverage where she's Dot, she has on a fake head to her left, which is Bette, and it moves," Murphy said. "She will record her dialogue that the other one has and she'll have an ear wig, so she literally has to do scenes with herself, which is insane. It's absolutely crazy."
Scenes with the twins take between 12-15 hours to film because Paulson has to record everything three of four times.
Murphy said that the American Horror Story favorite did not want other people to read dialogue off-camera to help move things along.
"She's worked out different tones and accents for the two characters," he said.
He added that every scene for the twins has to be filmed multiple times for close-up, medium shots as well as for the master recording - and again for green screen and any over the shoulder and other shots.
"To Sarah's credit, it's an amazing feat because she's playing two people with different attitudes, different facial expressions, and she has different backstories for them both," Murphy explains. "She has to be left-handed, she has to be right-handed. She had to learn how to walk in a special way and did a lot of research on that. It's been fascinating to film and edit. We both love it and it's one of, if not the best thing, Sarah has done. It's absolutely the most challenging thing I've ever seen any actor do ever. She really went for it. It's thrilling to see somebody embrace something so hard."
