Monica Lewinsky on 'Impeachment: American Crime Story': 'It is incredibly surreal'

Monica Lewinsky doesn't need to watch Impeachment: American Crime Story, the third season of FX's popular crime anthology series, to be taken back to the political sex scandal that rocked the United States in 1998.

Lewinsky lives with it every day, but she told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview that having Beanie Feldstein portray the most vulnerable time of her life on-screen: 

"It is incredibly surreal," Lewinsky said during a joint interview with Feldstein. "I'm very lucky to be in Beanie's hands in that way, but it's very challenging. There are many moments where I'm transported to a memory from the show. But also, there's the kind of bizarreness that when we relive a memory in our head, we don't see ourselves. So, I found in watching it that there were moments where I was just thinking, like, 'Oh God, don’t talk to her. Don’t smile at him. Don’t wear the beret—just don’t wear the beret.'

"But also to see the chemistry between Beanie and Clive [Owen, who plays Clinton]," the 48-year-old activist continued. "There are aspects of Bill that I think Clive has captured that people haven’t seen before, and it’s like, 'Oh, as a producer, I should be able to speak to something like that.' But as a person who lived some of this, it’s very surreal. Also, I think something that’s been hard for people to understand, and I hope we’re able to capture this in episode 10, is just because I was not on the news every night for 20 years in the same way that I was in 1998, doesn’t mean this story had ended. This has a very, very long tail."

Lewinsky, who serves as a producer, disclosed that she paid a trauma therapist to sit on Zoom with her while working on notes for the show "because it's hard; it's really hard."

"I’m most excited about the return of her story," Feldstein later added. "The thing I don’t think people understand about this story is the depth of pain that Monica had to go through during it. Like, episode six is all about when Monica was with the FBI in the Ritz-Carlton. [Baited by Linda Tripp, Lewinsky was detained for about 11 hours by prosecutors and FBI agents of the office of the independent counsel.] I don’t think most people know that that happened."

Created by Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski and Tom Rob Smith, Impeachment—as you may have guessed by now—chronicles the inappropriate sexual relationship between Lewinsky, a White House intern at the time, and then-President Bill Clinton, who subsequently became the first U.S. President to face impeachment since Andrew Johnson in 1868. 

According to the official website, the series specifically "tells this story through the eyes of the women at the center": Lewinsky, Tripp (Sarah Paulson) and Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford).

The season premiere will air Sept. 7. Watch the official trailer below.