As an actor, 'O.J.'s' Sarah Paulson is quite a juggler

When Sarah Paulson doubles down, viewers appear to be the winners.

The actress, who portrayed conjoined twins in 2014's American Horror Story: Freak Show, took on two very different roles at the same time last year during the filming of FX's American Horror Story: Hotel and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (Tuesday, 10 p.m. ET/PT).

While Paulson was portraying Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark, a role now receiving much attention and praise, she also was shooting a very different character, the junkie Sally, in Hotel.

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Logistically, she was able to pull both off because the two anthology series are produced by Ryan Murphy, a frequent collaborator, and they filmed on adjacent sets in Los Angeles.

That didn't mean it was easy, Paulson tells USA TODAY.

"It was challenging for both productions to try to figure it out" in terms of scheduling, she says. "It was challenging for me as an actress to split my brain into two parts."

She would work all day – or night – on one series, grab whatever sleep she could and then take on the other role.

"It was always harder to go from Sally to Marcia, because I would end the day with painted bruises, track marks, chipped nail polish, this horrifying hairdo and kinky, black eye makeup. I sometimes just couldn't get it all off when I got home and I thought, 'It's better for me to sleep and take this off in the makeup trailer in the morning and have a couple of people help me do it than to worry about scrubbing all of this off and staying up an extra hour,' " Paulson says. "So, I would go into the makeup trailer to play Marcia and three people would descend and start taking off the polish and the track marks and chopping my hair down into that wig. It took a village, I can tell you that."

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Physically, Paulson, who has appeared in such films as Carol and 12 Years a Slave, felt the effects of sleep deprivation, but she sees a silver lining.

"I was really, really tired. (Since) Sally had a little bit of a heroin problem and Marcia was working unfathomably long hours, the good news is neither one of them had to look well-rested," she says. "That's how I was able to pull it off. I was able to look as tired as I felt."