The One Audition Line That Solidified Evan Peters' American Horror Story Role
In the beginning, before Evan Peters was smearing his face with Cheeto dust in "Cult," before he was chewing the scenery as a dead robber baron in "Hotel," before he was Taissa Farmiga's Franken-boyfriend in "Coven," Evan Peters was Tate Langdon. This was the very first season of "American Horror Story," before it was even being called "Murder House." Like most "AHS" characters, Tate does some truly atrocious, gruesome things, both while alive and as a ghost.
Peters obviously had no idea at the time, but playing the troubled dead son of Constance Langdon (Jessica Lange) would only be the first time he collaborated with Ryan Murphy. Not only has he gone on to play some kind of role in most seasons of "American Horror Story," but he also appeared in eight episodes of Murphy and Brad Falchuk's "Pose," and played one of the United States' most notorious serial killers in Murphy's "Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story."
For Peters, though, it all starts with Tate Langdon. "In the character description it says 'you don't know if he's gonna kiss or kill you,'" he told GQ. This clearly intrigued him as an actor. And if it hadn't been for one relatively insignificant line, he might not have gotten the opportunity to play the killer ghost.
It was, of course, a line about blood
In the GQ video segment, Evan Peters describes how he had no clue what "American Horror Story" would end up being, nor that it was going to end up as an anthology series. He does say that he was drawn to the way the character was written, but even here he seems to have taken it with a grain of salt.
"There's a line about Indian blood, and like, talking about the dream that he had, and [Tate's] like 'I like that.'" The line that Peters is referring to is when sad and edgy Tate tells Violet (Taissa Farmiga) that Native Americans believed the blood contained bad spirits, and for that reason would cut themselves once a month to let the bad spirits out. Of course, Tate is mostly spouting off here. While some indigenous cultures around the world do engage in some form of bloodletting ritual, he's more seizing the opportunity to be dark and macabre rather than sharing any actual knowledge about indigenous peoples. Maybe that's why Peters saw it as kind of a throwaway line. It apparently stuck with Ryan Murphy, though. "I remember Ryan told me, you know, years later, he was like 'because of the way you said that line, that's why you got the role.'"
Peters was taken aback when Murphy told him this. "I was like 'oh... cool.' But I wasn't really thinking about that line." Just goes to show, you can never tell when a casting director is really paying attention.