At 51, Chloë Sevigny Says She’s Finally Learning to Rest (Exclusive)
Chloë Sevigny reflects on love, relationships, and decades in Hollywood — and how midlife and insomnia changed the way she lives and rests.
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Chloë Sevigny has been steadily working since she was nineteen, building a career that spans far beyond Kids and Big Love to more recent work in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, as well as stepping into an executive producer role with the upcoming documentary Summer Tour.
“I feel like I have lived a lot of lives and a full life,” Chloë tells LA Times Studios exclusively. “And I’m also just now getting to settle into things.” Settling both literally and figuratively.
A Quieter Kind of Next Chapter
Having recently bought a second home, what she calls her “retirement home” in Provincetown, she describes this chapter as the life she always wanted to live with a body that’s taken on a mind of its own.
“I’m just so lucky to have found this wonderful man and I’ve had a child. Things that I had always wanted, but thought had eluded me,” she says. “They came to me late, but I’m really grateful that all those things happened for me. I have my husband and son, I have my mother and I have my friends and I have my work. And it’s a lot of stuff to manage and look after and take care of. A lot of emotional bandwidth you have to have.”
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And part of navigating that bandwidth has meant accepting changes she didn’t anticipate. “One of the more frustrating things is not being able to drink alcohol anymore,” she says. “I love a martini, and I love having wine with dinner. I can’t do martinis. I can’t do wine. Now I’m drinking IPAs because that’s the only thing that weirdly doesn’t keep me up all night. So I’ll have one beer.”
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It’s a sleep issue, she explains. Her body simply won’t let her rest if she drinks the way she used to. And her social life has adjusted accordingly. She used to go out four nights a week. Late dinners, dancing until two in the morning.
Smarter sleep starts here
“I lived for being out with my friends and dancing and going to clubs and socializing and running around town,” she says. Now she puts her son to bed around eight and is in bed herself by nine. “It’s embarrassing,” she laughs, “but you have to protect your sleep however you can.”
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Her friends have adapted. “Can we go to dinner at seven?” is the ask now. “All my friends are so understanding. Just prioritizing having rest because I want to be present for my relationships, my work, my family… and knowing that that has to be a priority, and being okay with that.”
Inside Chloë Sevigny’s Night Routine — and How She Sleeps
Sleep, she’ll tell you, has never been easy for her. “I always said if I could change one thing about me, it’d be that I could just easily fall asleep and stay asleep,” she says. “I’ve gone through, pre-kid, post-kid, as long as I can remember, trying everything.”
Chloë Sevigny exclusively tells LA Times Studios she designed her Provincetown “retirement home” for rest — from secondhand decor to a bedroom built around better sleep.
And everything adds up. Not as a neat nighttime routine, more like a rotation she’s returned to over the years, depending on the night. Oils. Reading. Audiobooks and This American Life playing low in the background, something else for her mind to follow. “That would very much take my mind off of whatever was cycling over and over and keeping me from resting.”
Periods of the Calm app. Sleep gummies. Lavender oil in capsule form. Magnesium, which she remains a true believer in.
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Environmental factors matter too. Darkness is non-negotiable. She’s had blackout curtains for years. “Darkness helps a lot,” she says. Her sheets can’t be tucked in. She needs the right pillow. A window cracked open, even in winter. An eye mask. Tissue in her ears. “There’s a whole plethora of things,” she says laughingly.
And beneath all of it, the mattress. “The most important thing for a good night’s sleep is the mattress, first and foremost. Sleep begins and ends with a good mattress.” It’s why she keeps returning to Savoir, the brand she calls the “Cadillac” of mattresses long associated with its New York showroom (although now expanding to Los Angeles).
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Midlife Became a Turning Point for Chloë Sevigny
What comes through most clearly, talking with Sevigny about this phase of her life, is a woman who has become increasingly comfortable with knowing what she actually wants. And less patient with performing otherwise.
“I feel like I don’t care as much about what men in Hollywood think of me anymore,” she says. Being an actress in the ‘90s, she explains, meant your worth was measured almost entirely by how men perceived you. “We were so conditioned that so much of our worth was tied up in the way we looked and how men perceived us.” That’s shifted. The industry has, and so has she. “I’m not caring if they think I look pretty or sexy or whatever. I just want to feel good in myself.”
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And that’s a freedom she didn’t have when she was starting out, she explains. Back then, she says, individuality wasn’t exactly encouraged. “You weren’t even supposed to be an individual. You had to be a cookie-cutter mold and let people be able to project onto you.” For someone who never quite fit that mold, it was disorienting. “That was very confusing for me because I felt very much an individual.
That same instinct, to hold onto what feels true, shows up in how she lives now. The Provincetown home, the earlier bedtimes, the single beer instead of the martini. A life organized around what she actually needs, not what she used to be able to push through.
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