Ryan Murphy has corrected the single biggest assumption fans have made about American Horror Story: 13. In interview footage circulating this week, shared by the fan account @americanhorrorstory, the co-creator said the thirteenth outing of the FX anthology is not the Coven sequel everyone has been bracing for. It is every season at once.
“Everybody thinks it’s a Coven season, and it’s not,” Murphy said. “It’s all the seasons.”
A Crossover Built Like The Avengers
Murphy went on to lay out the sheer scale of the thing, and the numbers are staggering even by this franchise’s standards. Sarah Paulson is playing six or seven roles across the season. Jessica Lange is playing all four of her iconic characters, a direct nod to her run as a series regular across Murder House, Asylum, Coven, and Freak Show. Evan Peters is playing five characters. Kathy Bates, Emma Roberts, and Billie Lourd are all back as well.
“It’s like the Avengers,” Murphy said. “They all come together to defeat the ultimate evil.”
The Pitch That Finally Brought Everyone Back
According to Murphy, the crossover premise is exactly what unlocked a cast list that had been out of reach for years. Many of the actors had turned down previous invitations to return, he said, and the scope of this idea changed their minds. He singled out Lange, who had publicly insisted she was finished with the series, recalling her resigned reaction to the pitch: “now I have to do it.”
Murphy also dropped a detail the network has not announced. The season runs 13 episodes, “because it’s called 13,” which would make it the longest order any American Horror Story season has received since Freak Show. He added that he spent many months and several years writing it, calling it a deliberate attempt to do the number 13 in a special way. FX has not commented on the remarks.
What Season 13 Has Already Locked In
The season premieres Thursday, September 24 at 9 p.m. ET on FX and Hulu, and will stream internationally on Disney+. Confirmed character returns already reported by TVLine include Paulson as Cordelia Goode, Roberts as Madison Montgomery, Frances Conroy as Myrtle Snow, Gabourey Sidibe as Queenie, Leslie Grossman as Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt, and Angela Bassett as Marie Laveau. Ariana Grande, part of the original cast announcement, exited the season in early July over a conflict with her tour schedule.
Murphy’s comments reframe nearly everything that has been reported about the season so far. Set photos from New York pointed squarely at a Coven reunion, and the rebuilt Miss Robichaux’s Academy sets seemed to settle the question. Instead, the witches appear to be one thread in a season pulling from all twelve previous installments, which would make this the largest crossover the anthology has ever attempted.
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