But Lange's favorite character on this season of American Horror Story may just be New Orleans itself. "There's Madame LaLaurie, there's Fiona Goode, there's Marie Laveau, there's New Orleans. It's unique in this country I think, that city. It has this extraordinary ability to live in the past and the present. Time kind of melds. I don't know any other place like that. And so authentic still, to its culture and to the people. You feel on the street what these people feel about this place. I mean, you walk down the streets of New York and everybody just looks so unhappy," she notes with a laugh, staring out the window above Times Square. "They're not all that happy to be here. But in New Orleans, you get this sense that this is home and we're connected. We're connected through generations and we're connected through the arts and the music and the food and the culture. I mean, it permeates the air ... not to paint too rosy a picture because there's a lot of darkness there, but what I find fascinating is how you can be in a place where you sense the decay and the decadence and the elegance and the spirit and everything is just moving together."

Murphy has said that it was Lange's idea to set Coven in the rehabilitated Louisiana city, with which she's been getting more intimate. "I have a bike so I ride my bike through all these neighborhoods that I would never normally go to. And then you start to see things and realize, I'd like to photograph this or I'd like to photograph that," says Lange, a photographer since her days in the late '60s studying art at the University of Minnesota.

"It certainly was what I first became fascinated with a long time ago, but then moved away from it. Never pursued it really seriously," she says of photography. "And then, of course, I started acting and that became the great passion in my life. And then I came back to photography much later. I've really only been shooting now again for maybe 15 years, but it is a great love of mine ... I've always been, I think, stunned by the power of photography and more so with black and white than with color and more so with still than moving. It's also that thing of now, in this day and age, where everybody has access to photography, every idiot feels like they can make a documentary, and everybody can post their photos online or whatever, the idea that there's still this art to it makes me more and more interested in going backward rather than forward," Lange adds, noting her recent fascination with photogravure, a photomechanical process from the early 19th century.