Lily Rabe Found Her Way Back Home

In 2025, Lily Rabe returned to the theater after a 10-year hiatus, much of it spent in L.A. filming the Ryan Murphy anthology series American Horror Story. She describes her return to the stage last year — for the Lincoln Center Theater production of Ghosts, alongside husband and fellow actor Hamish Linklater — as a “homecoming.” That is, until she returned to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park earlier this month.

“If I do feel like I have a single theatrical home or stage, it would be that stage,” says the actor, 44, who stars as Hermione in The Public Theater’s production of The Winter’s Tale, running through Aug. 23. “It’s the same place in the best way,” she adds of the theater, which reopened in 2025 after an $85 million renovation. “They just keep expanding it without ever going off course or changing the fundamental vision that makes that place unlike any other place… which is a theater that belongs to the city of New York.”

The Winter’s Tale marks Rabe’s fifth run doing Shakespeare in the Park, beginning in 2010 when she portrayed Portia in Merchant of Venice, which many consider to be her breakout role — she received a Tony nomination when the play later transferred to Broadway. Now, in The Winter’s Tale, Rabe plays Hermione, a queen falsely accused by her jealous husband, King Leontes, of having an affair with his childhood friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, and carrying his baby.

“Every part of who she is resonates with me and inspires me — her devotion to her children, that she would do anything for her children,” says Rabe, who has three children with Linklater and a stepdaughter. “She is never going to stop fighting for what is right and for the truth.”

On revisiting works again and again:

Hamish and I were talking last night about plays we’d love to do again. And it’s not because we felt like there was anything missing when we did them the first time. What’s so beautiful about Shakespeare is you get to bring your soul, your current soul and your current experience, into whatever role you’re playing. There’s a reason that I think actors want to play these parts over and over again at different times in their lives.

We were talking about Much Ado About Nothing specifically. He was going on about how it’s the most wonderful thing to dream about all of the parts, but it’s not like you check them off the list. You want to keep coming back. You want to come back to the same play and play a different part. You want to play the part that you played again. Playing Beatrice and Benedick [in Much Ado About Nothing], when we played it, was exactly right, and [director] Jack O’Brien wanted us at exactly those ages. And if we were to do it 10 or 20 years from now, some of those lines would carry something completely different. To play Hermione at this moment in time in my life means something completely different from playing the roles that I played at those other times. And that’s what’s so beautiful.

On staying cool at the Delacorte:

You don’t. You’re hot, you’re sweating. It’s like you’re doing some Bikram Shakespeare sometimes. There are tricks and things, like places to put ice packs that can help cool your body down, but you can’t do that during the show. You really need your electrolytes; you really have to hydrate — which, of course, but you have to be more mindful about it than when you’re doing a play indoors. I’m not a person who eats during a show, but I do in the park — I’ll have a banana at intermission, which isn’t something I would do if I were indoors.

It’s a little bit of that athlete’s mentality. There’s an endurance aspect to it. You are just in the element that you’re in. If it’s raining, you’re going to get wet. If it’s hot, you’re going to sweat. So I think it’s just leaning into that — and making sure that you have a lot of electrolytes in your system.

On her pre-show rituals:

I will never be a half-hour person. I’m always there well before the half-hour before the house opens so that I can go out and stand onstage and warm up. And some of my favorite warmups are Linklater [voice work], and it’s funny because I didn’t actually learn them from Hamish or Kristin [her late mother-in-law] — I learned them from someone else. We were doing them once on a show, and I was like, “Gosh, my voice feels so strong. What is this? What are we doing?” And [Hamish] sort of laughed at me. He’s like, “What are you talking about? That’s Linklater.”

On what Hermoine stands for:

Every single time I get to play these women — Portia and Rosalind and Imogen and Beatrice and now Hermione — it’s almost as if they speak to the time that we’re in. And I think that Hermione represents truth. She certainly hasn’t done what Leontes is accusing her of, and she is true in that way. But I also think when she is kind of forced into these impossible circumstances that no one should ever be forced into, every decision she makes is linked to staying with what is true. Even when she knows she’s going to lose her life, what she’s fighting for is her honor, because that is the legacy for her children. And she’s not going to let her life and what she has stood for be erased. And she is fearless, but it doesn’t mean she’s not afraid. Both things can be true at the same time.

On postshow postmortems with her husband:

Being in the city, there’s nothing like a late-night walk — even just walking out of the park every night. They have the golf carts, but I’m like, “Oh, gosh, I want to walk out of the park.” It’s pretty late by the time I get back, and it’s 50-50 Ham is still awake. If he is, then we stay up and talk. Or I’ll talk to a friend who’s in L.A. that I haven’t talked to in a while. I’ve never been someone who can just come home from a show and go to sleep. It takes me a while to come down.

But my favorite thing to do is to stay up and get to talk to Hamish about whatever, and very often it’s about the show, and I’m so glad I have someone who will never tire of talking about it. We’re often doing plays together, and so we’ll come home together and continue the conversation. But even when we’re not doing a show together, what’s wonderful is that it feels like we are in a way, because this thing is such a shared love.