The second season of Ryan Murphy'S Feud anthology series – titled Capote vs. The Swans – tells the writer's story Truman Capote's friendship and eventual feud with New York City's most elite female group, which he nicknamed The Swans.
Screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz based his show on the book Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era Through Laurence Leamerwhich was released in October 2021.
The Swans consist of Barbara “Babe” Paley (Naomi Watts), Nancy “Slim” Keith (Diane Lane), CZ guest (Chloe Sevigny) and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart).
“It was like performance art that she brought into the world,” Watts said Entertainment weekly in January 2024 about her role as Paley. “Everything she thought about was planned: how to plan a dinner party and who was there. Who is sitting next to each other? Where does the fork go? What are the fabrics of the napkins? Do the candles smell good? All of these things created such a tremendous amount of planning, but so often nothing was left for themselves.”
Watts, like her costars, underwent a major transformation before taking on the role.
“She was never filmed in the press. I had no recordings of her, audio or visual,” Watts added. “So I really had to figure all that out based on what was available.”
Keep scrolling to see how the portrayals of Watts and her co-stars hold up compared to the real-life socialites who inspired Feud: Capote vs. the Swans: