Stories from the set

The character Tate Langdon was named after Sharon Tate – the wife of director Roman Polanski, who was murdered by members of Charles Manson's group in 1969.

Larry Harvey – the character with the burned face is named after the founder of the popular Burning Man festival.

The Harmon mansion is a real building located in Los Angeles and known as the "Rosenheim House." It was built in 1908, designed by Alfred Rosenheim, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects and one of the city's most influential architects. The pilot episode was filmed in this house; for the filming of subsequent episodes, sets were built on the studio stages that exactly reproduced the interiors of the Rosenheim mansion.

Angela Bassett plays the role of Marie Laveau — a real 19th-century voodoo queen from New Orleans who became a legend during her lifetime. The actress says she prepared seriously for the role and even consulted with local experts.

The character played by Wes Bentley was mistakenly believed to have been a real person, but this turned out not to be the case. It was thought that he was a 19th-century aristocrat who suffered from diprosopus (or craniofacial duplication, an extremely rare hereditary condition). Supposedly he had a second face on the back of his head that could neither eat nor speak, but was said to be able to laugh and cry. It is claimed that he begged doctors to surgically remove the second face, but no one agreed to do so, as a result of which the aristocrat committed suicide at the age of 23. It turned out that all of this was a lie, and that the story was invented as a sensation for the newspaper the Boston Sunday Post in 1895.

Writer and producer Ryan Murphy and Jessica Lange became so friendly while working on the first season that Murphy began consulting the actress when describing other characters. For example, as a result of Lange's advice, Jude's sister appeared in the second season, the elegant Fiona in the third, and moreover, the series owes the appearance of Elsa Mars, the owner of the freak show, to Lange's fascination with photography and the world of the circus (especially of the 1950s era).

The Hotel Cortez is based on the Hotel Cecil, whose history had plenty of dark pages, including several murders. Serial killers also stayed there at one time, such as Richard Ramirez, also known as the Night Stalker (1960-2013), and Jack Unterweger (1950-1994). In 2013, the Hotel Cecil made the news thanks to the mysterious death of Elisa Lam (1991-2013). The fifth season of the series is dedicated to her.

Actress Sarah Paulson, who played the twins Bette and Dot in Freak Show, had to wear a second, prosthetic head on her shoulder, onto which facial features were superimposed using computer technology. As a result, all scenes with Paulson took longer than usual to film (10 hours each), since it was necessary to film the interaction between Paulson (and each time she played either one role or the other) and the other members of the cast several times in a row.

In the second season, Chris Zylka was supposed to play a deaf-mute character in a couple of episodes, but he refused to shave his head for the role, and his character was written out of the plot.