Sarah Paulson has to go to a dark, instinctual place to play Sally on FX's American Horror Story: Hotel.

'American Horror Story: Hotel' Ratings Continue Dropping, Are Viewers Turned Off?

Paulson is playing her most outrageous character yet as Sally, a drug addict who roams the hallways of the Hotel Cortez as a ghost. The actress spoke with The Daily Beast about how Sally is a very flawed person.

"She's so f---ed up! Sally is so addicted to wanting to feel and then anesthetizing herself from feeling, and being selfish and entitled," Paulson explained. "She's just a mess of a person. But she's in love with John Lowe [Wes Bentley], and that makes her very desperate. There is such desperation to her, and that's not a comfortable place to live."

This Movie Star Might Join 'American Horror Story' Just To Work With Sarah Paulson

To play someone who purely goes on instinct, Paulson chooses to not prepare too much for her performance.

"With Sally, I thought what I'm going doing here is just let it fly. Don't overthink it. Don't overprepare it. Just go on total and utter instinct, because that's what she was," she said. "Sally is a beast. She's a beast of need and want and hunger and dependency. I just thought, oh, you don't have to work too hard on that. You have plenty of that inside you, and you don't have to worry now about concealing any of it. There's a great freedom in letting out just the ugliest parts of yourself and going, 'It's just the character!' Meanwhile people who know you are like, 'Wow, that is the real you.'"

While Paulson's Sally made her mark earlier in the season, this has also been the actress' smallest role on the series perhaps since Murder House. She has been missing entirely from the past two episodes and has had relatively small screentime compared to her co-stars. However, the preview for next week's episode shows she's back and in the center of the action.

American Horror Story: Hotel airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX.

Tags: American Horror Story television fx