Michele K. Short/FX

You've mentioned this character is different than your other characters. When I watch, there's something that's underlying tragic with her. She's so hungry for fame and acceptance and she's selfish in a way, but has this big heart. Out of all the characters you've played on American Horror Story, I feel like I'm pulling for her the most.

Well, I think she's the most complete. I think she's the most dimensional, the most complex. Because we're really exploring her history too, that lends—I mean, it just adds so much more to when we're playing scenes in the present to have an idea of the kind of tragedy that this woman suffered in the past. It just adds something to it; it adds a bottom to the character that for me is great. You can keep layering all the time and not be just kind of arbitrary, it's all based in something that we've been able to in the storytelling establish.

We're up to episode five, by now we've kind of explored her history and know how it all came down. It's good, there's a lot more that we go back to, but it's been just the most complete character I've played in years and years and years. With the singing and the past, the idea that she has tremendous love and care for these [people] who she refers to as her "monsters." She truly does and I think that's absolutely genuine. It's that kind of tragic flaw in a character when she's going to be her kind of innate, basic nature is being defeated by her own ambition. It's very kind of Shakespearean in a way. I'm not comparing this to a Shakespeare character, but that idea of ambition destroying the innate good nature of a human being, it's interesting to play. I have scenes in German, I've got scenes in Italian, we're all over the place with this. It's really great. And then the singing and the performing, it's pretty wonderful.