Sarah Paulson is an actress and overall wonderful person who is kind of Hollywood’s sweetheart the the moment due to the sheer amount of wonderful content she’s been in during the last few years. She’s very talented. And beautiful.
I was watching her latest film, Run, on Hulu yesterday while running through her social media mentions. In the movie she plays an possessive mother, hellbent on keeping her daughter close to home. Her character has Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy (that’s not a spoiler, btw!). But even before this film, it has been a long standing joke that fans and stans alike will call her “mom” or “mommy”. Internet culture is weird. Paulson has addressed it and has seemed to accept it! (We’ve done something similar with Lady Gaga’s “mother monster” persona. In fact, calling a public figure “mom” or “mommy” has become a shorthand for expressing admiration.)
What is SO FUNNY is that Paulson’s 11th house is Cancer, the archetypal mommy. And 11th house is the place of fans, followings, audience. So that her fan base calls her mom, however strange, has symbolic resonance with her chart. As per usual, we see astrology manifesting correctly in the weirdest of ways. She has Big Mommy Energy.
What’s more, she has Saturn in Cancer in that 11th house. The mom and mom-like figures (think, caretakers) she plays are often maleficent or are in creepy/unsavory plots. In Run (poisonous mom), Ratched (poisonous nurse), literally all of her roles in American Horror Story, and even her so-good-but-awful role in 12 Years a Slave, playing a cruel mistress and house mother. She even plays hated (Saturn) women (Cancer), like Marcia Clark in American Crime Story: OJ and will be back in the series playing Linda Tripp. These are controversial figures! Even in more nuanced portrayals, like that of anti-feminist housewife Alice Macray on Mrs. America, Paulson seems to symbolically tap in on the restrictive or challenging nature of Saturn placed in a sign of femininity and care taking.
There is a running joke on social media is also that Paulson’s is the queen of crying and screaming on screen. And I thought—that’s about as Saturn in Cancer as it gets! Frigid, scared, crying women. Saturn is about things that go bump in the night. Cancer is about how we emote that fear.
I find it fascinating how actors pick roles that seem to illustrate their chart. Even if in their normal waking life that part of the chart is dormant in personal affairs, it can be expressed through artistic choices. It calls to mind the roles we play within our own networks. How those fans, followers, and friends see us.
Paulson’s Moon in Aquarius rules that Cancer 11th from the 6th house, creating a nice little mutual reception. Her life’s work (6th house) is embedded in expressing that mommy archetype, even in the darkest ways (Saturn).