“I remember I used to talk about ‘playing a bitch,’” Diane Lane said, sitting in a banquette at a hotel in West Hollywood, sipping tea. “That was a jargon that I would use. I don’t even know how I feel about that anymore, because one person’s bitch is another person’s hero.”

That is certainly one word viewers might use to describe Annette Shepherd, the character Lane plays on the final season of Netflix’s House of Cards, which premieres November 2. Annette is a former school friend of Claire Underwood’s—or is it frenemy? Each woman has processed the genteel, ladylike expectations placed on them in different ways. Claire is now brazenly wielding power as the president of the United States, while Annette quietly pulls strings in the shadows as one half of the brother-sister team who run Shepherd Unlimited (with Greg Kinnear as Bill Shepherd), a massive conglomerate that has the power to make or break world leaders.

There was as much drama and history made behind the scenes of House of Cards this season as there was on-screen, of course. Kevin Spacey was fired from his lead role as Frank Underwood after being accused of sexual misconduct, forcing the show to suspend production. (Spacey has apologized to actor Anthony Rapp, and sought treatment in the wake of further allegations.) “Eventually, the show’s producers, including Robin Wright, devised a way to face the problem head-on, putting women—and more importantly, female fury—at the dead center of the story. “The reign of the middle-aged white man is over,” Wright’s President Claire Underwood declares at one point. “The Bill Shepherds of the world who won’t let go, have to go.”

Lane had just finished several days of promoting the series, and she seemed both mellow and frazzled. Her conversational style was effervescently slippery, shifting between past and present so that it sometimes felt like she was keeping parallel discussions going on in her head. (At one point she warned me, “When you play this [recording] back, you’re gonna think I’m super odd!”) She explained that in addition to the demands of her work, she was absorbing the recent deaths of a friend and her 18-year-old cat. “It’s like many planets are spinning at the same time,” she said.

Lane has been a working actress since the age of six when she began performing with the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York. I feel like I grew up watching her characters grow up—from the cool teens of A Little Romance, The Outsiders, and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains to the passionate adults of Unfaithful, Under the Tuscan Sun, and Cinema Verite. In her 47-year career, she has played characters who are steely, sweet, and everything in between, but she briefly quit movies around 2008 when the parts just didn’t feel substantial enough.

Now Lane said she finds herself in a culture and an industry being changed by women speaking up against abuses of power—and she loves it, even telling her 25-year-old daughter, “I gotta learn about the culture I’m participating in, because it’s changing so fast that I’m back to being a student.”

Lane also is learning about the world of TV. She recently shot a pilot for a possible FX adaptation of the graphic novel Y: The Last Man, which she hopes will be picked up. And in addition to her role in House of Cards, Lane stars in Matthew Weiner’s Amazon anthology series, The Romanoffs. It allowed her to dive into “Matthew Weiner-land” and to “see his next move, or response to expectations” after Mad Men, she said with a throaty laugh. “I love his capacity for vision long-term,” she said. “I believe, with time, there’s going to be an aha moment for the viewers of The Romanoffs. . . . The exploration is part of it. What do you see in it? It’s kind of a Rorschach test.”