ELIZA COUPE: Oh my God, yes. It’s the dream to be able to do something that’s funny, but also bad-ass and cool. Then Future Man comes along with this character named Tiger, which is just fricking awesome. Honestly, it’s a dream job. And I hate reading things from actors where they say exactly that, but it really is a dream job. It just encompasses everything that I want to do right now.

Different productions will go to different lengths with this sort of thing, but did the show have you do any sorts of martial arts, fire arms training, or anything like that for the role?

We didn’t have to do anything like that. However, the cool thing was that because this show was going into unchartered territory we could make up new rules for things like combat. Derek Wilson’s character and myself are from a future where everything has been abolished. So they learn how to fight in a very raw, unstylized kind of way. That was helpful for me since I don’t have any training in those areas, but I did get to do a bunch of my own stunts, which was pretty cool. I have two unbelievable stunt doubles, but I got to do the minor stuff. Like tricks with knives, which was really cool. I can spin knives now and do all sorts of crazy shit!

On that note, Tiger certainly feels like the most exaggerated character that you’ve played, but she’s also shut off in a bunch of ways, too. What are some of the challenges of playing a character of such an extreme nature?

The project was presented to me as a comedy, but I like to—or at least I try to, whether people realize it or not—ground my characters in the real world and through the way that they perceive it. I don’t like just going for the joke. There’s a lot more to things than that. Even with Happy Endings, I went there with my character, Jane. I lived it and people thought I was nuts, but that’s what I was trying to achieve.