Kathy Bates latest ‘American Horror Story’ actress to join Ryan Murphy’s ‘Feud’

It’s well-known that Ryan Murphy loves using some of the same actors for multiple projects, and when you work with some of the caliber of people that he does, it’s pretty darn easy to understand why. This is a man who has in his Rolodex such people as Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange, and Evan Peters. Why wouldn’t you want to work with these people at every opportunity possible?

We knew before today that Murphy was working with Lange, Paulson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Susan Sarandon on his upcoming FX anthology “Feud,” a show designed to capture some of the most iconic disputes in the history of … well, history. This season in particular is chronicling the rivalry between Bette Davis (Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Lange), and we now know officially that he also has Kathy Bates on board to play the part of Joan Blondell, an Oscar nominee who happened to be rather close to Crawford. It’s tremendous casting, and of course Bates is a Murphy confidante coming off of the past four seasons of “American Horror Story.” She also has a comedy project in the works over at Netflix entitled “Disjointed.”

Will “Feud” turn out to be worthwhile viewing? All indications for now suggest so, but it’s going to have a near-impossible time trying to top Murphy’s other true-to-life opus in “The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story,” undoubtedly in our mind the finest television program of 2016. We don’t quite consider that to be a hot-take, given that many other TV critics likely feel the same way.

“Feud” won’t be premiering until 2017, and we also have a feeling that this probably won’t be the last casting news on the subject of the show we get to hear.