Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson’s Relationship: Why They Live Apart

• Holland Taylor, 83, and Sarah Paulson, 51, still keep separate homes in Los Angeles. In New York, they share Taylor’s apartment when both are in town.
• Taylor said on The Drew Barrymore Show on Oct. 20 that “work takes us apart constantly,” and that they have been together “12 years going on.”
• They met at a dinner party in the mid-2000s, went public around 2015 and are almost 32 years apart in age.

Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson have been together more than a decade, and they still don’t share a house. Taylor explained how it works on The Drew Barrymore Show on Tuesday, Oct. 20, after Paulson surprised her with a video question.

“What was your first impression of me?” Paulson asked from backstage. Taylor said she saw “the most youthful Hollywood dazzling dazzler,” and found out about 10 years later that Paulson was very different from that.

Do Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson live together?

Part of the time. Taylor has an apartment in New York, where they stay together when both are in the city. In Los Angeles, each has her own house, though Taylor said Paulson hasn’t moved into her new one and has been staying at Taylor’s for almost a year.

We do as much time as we possibly can, because work takes us apart constantly.

Holland Taylor, on The Drew Barrymore Show, Oct. 20, 2026

Paulson was the first to talk about it. “We don’t live together. That’s the secret,” she said on the SmartLess podcast in May 2024, adding that they’re “together when we want to be, and we’re not when we don’t.”

She also said Taylor hadn’t lived with a partner in a long time, and that having Paulson “all of a sudden” in her space was “a lot.” Paulson called Taylor her third relationship of more than five years.

Some read it as a couple that barely saw each other, and Paulson corrected that on the Emmys red carpet in September 2024.

“We don’t live together meaning we don’t own a home together, but we are together more often than we are not,” she said. Taylor’s version was “in one home or the other, back and forth.”

How did Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson meet?

At a dinner party in the mid-2000s, according to a 2016 New York Times profile of Paulson. She was dating someone else and remembered Taylor as “probably the most exquisitely beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”

Years later, they worked together on a campaign for a reproductive rights organization and started messaging on Twitter. In 2015, Taylor said on WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast that she was seeing a younger woman, without naming her.

Paulson has been the more public of the two. When she won her first Tony, for Appropriate in June 2024, she said from the stage: “Holland, thank you for loving me.” Taylor told TODAY she had “willed it and willed it” and was “overjoyed.”

What is the age gap between Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson?

Taylor was born on Jan. 14, 1943, and Paulson on Dec. 17, 1974, so the gap is almost 32 years. In 2015, when the relationship became public, Taylor was 72 and Paulson was 40.

Paulson addressed it in a 2016 Elle interview: “I didn’t choose to fall in love with the person I fell in love with. But I think why it’s interesting to people is that on paper, it’s unconventional.”

Both are working. Taylor, an Emmy winner for The Practice and Evelyn, the Harper brothers’ mother, on Two and a Half Men, plays Matthew McConaughey’s mom in Apple TV’s Brothers. Paulson stars in the second season of Hulu’s All’s Fair.

On the show, Taylor called Paulson “the most artful friend of anyone I’ve ever known,” someone who puts real time into the people she loves.

More on Paulson: everything we’ve covered about Sarah Paulson, including the “American Horror Story” Season 13 cast and her Aileen Wuornos in “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story”. Another famous pair, explained: how Dolly Parton became Miley Cyrus’ godmother. More in Celebrities.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson on The Drew Barrymore Show (Oct. 20, 2026); Sarah Paulson on the SmartLess podcast (May 2024); Paulson and Taylor to Entertainment Weekly at the 2024 Emmys; The New York Times profile of Paulson (2016); Paulson to Elle (2016); Taylor on WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money (2015); Paulson’s 2024 Tony Awards acceptance speech; Taylor on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna (2024). Photos: The Drew Barrymore Show, The Tony Awards, Hulu.