I can't believe Susan Sarandon was asked to play Bette Davis over and over again for 50 years before it finally happened!

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"He wrote back and said, 'I can't really give you advice, it has [to] come out of yourself, but I would advise you to have a bash and hope for the best, which I certainly wish you.' That he even bothered to reply to a 20-year-old nobody was very much a thrill. It's [a] letter which I've treasured ever since," he said.

"So we got Lorna over, and Lorna said, 'No. No. She never wore nail polish.' So that was it. I mean, that's a trivial example, but there were others," she said.

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford's infamous feud began in 1933, when news of Joan's divorce from Douglas Fairbanks Jr. overshadowed Bette's Ex-Lady publicity campaign. After three decades of drama, their conflict came to a head on the set of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, the only movie they ever made together. Their dislike of each other reportedly led to physical altercations on camera.

For example, Joan got a body double for a scene where Bette's character was supposed to beat hers because she worried her rival might actually harm her. However, when Joan had to film a closeup, Bette reportedly hit her so hard on the head that she had to get stitches. Bette said she "barely touched her."

Then, for a scene where Bette had to drag her out of bed, Joan reportedly weighed herself down with a weightlifter's belt and rocks and ruined multiple takes on purpose.

Additionally, in a less physical but nonetheless petty move, Bette reportedly put a Coke machine in her dressing room to aggravate Joan, who sat on Pepsi's board of directors.

She said, "She's just so indefinable that I was terrified. Ryan [Murphy, the series co-creator] said, 'Well, I am too.' I don't know why, but that made me feel better. I needed a dialect coach to be there. Even if I got the Yankee pronunciation right, the idiosyncratic stressing of weird words and sentences and her rhythm is so specific. So he agreed to have Tim Monich on set, which was an enormous help. Ryan actually does a pretty good Bette Davis — and Joan Crawford — so we had him to help us too."

She continued, "Fortunately for me, when I tried to get this done six years ago, everybody said no, so it wasn't working out, but I never could have done it then, not the way I did it today, because the last six years of my life have been filled with so many peaks and valleys. While dealing with the divorce from my husband, I went to some of the lowest lows in my own personal life, and I needed to go through certain dark places to relate to a character as complex as Dorothy. My own well was full with experiences to draw from, and sometimes it can be scary to use your own life to create a character, but as an actor, it's the only way. The more experiences you can have in life, be they highs or lows, we can use it to help better our craft."

"So I researched it pretty meticulously, and there was a tremendous amount of research that had been done before I came on that I was a beneficiary of in terms of the screenplay and Allen and the producers and what they'd done. So I was keyed in to where to look and who to talk to, and I wanted to play [him] as authentically as possible. And fortunately, he left behind a body of work that I could look at and watch. I saw all 104 episodes of the television show – 52 in color, 52 in black-and-white. And then So Proudly We Hail!, this movie he did with Claudette Colbert. He had other work. Obviously, he was in the beginning of Gone With the Wind. There's stuff available, so that was a great help to me. But to not belabor the point, yes, I really wanted to try to treat him fairly, and you benefit from a whole wealth of information to draw upon. If I screw that up, I really have no excuse," he said.

He continued, "Where is that conversation with English-speaking people doing things like The Last Duel, where they were supposed to be French people in the Middle Ages? That's fine. But me, with my Spanish accent, being Cuban? What I mean is, if we want to open the can of worms, let's open it for everyone. The role came to me, and one thing that I know for sure is that I'm going to give everything that I have."

However, Javier later emailed the outlet to add, "I do recognize that there are many underrepresented voices and stories that need to be told, and we should collectively do better to provide access and opportunities for more American Latino stories and storytellers."

"And then having [Richard] Attenborough direct it, he was like the Yoda of cinema, and just the fact that he cast me obviously was the endorsement. And then it was just this year process of shooting it. At a certain point, I had a one-way mirror with a TV playing VHS tapes of his old films, and I would try to match up where his face was in mine and literally just mimic him for hours and hours over a course of weeks and months. I employed every single way I could try to show up for that role," he said.

“If you read Me, her autobiography – and I don't know if you can believe a word in anything that somebody writes about themselves – she says that they were too alike to be together. They were both very ambitious and interested in pushing themselves through boundaries and breaking into new territories. She stretched what it meant to be a female actress in Hollywood, and that was a really brave and powerful thing, in the same way that Hughes made American business come to him," she said.