This one is so different, and it’s all because of Gillian. It all came from her imagination. This heartbreaking story between these women, hurting each other in such a fashion — it’s disturbing. I’m not tackling a project by entering it and going, “Oh, I want to be different than this show and this show and this show.” You just know when you first read when you’ll have something singular and special.

[Click here to read our recap of the series premiere.]

The series opens with a scene showing young Camille waking up her older self. Why did you choose that sequence to come first?

We’ve got to give credit to Marti [Noxon, the show’s creator and an executive producer], who came up with this plan, beautifully blending the past and the present and wondering, sometimes, what’s what. We pushed this concept even a little bit more on the set and then in the cutting room, always to accentuate and to give a sense of perspective, going into her head — what she sees is what we see, and it’s unclear whether it’s real or if it’s a fantasy, a dream, a flashback from the past.

You get a sense of when we are because of the political graffiti of Bush and Clinton and Gore, and then she gets to the house. Again, we’re wondering what this is, as the sound design is a little off and has this ghostlike quality. When we discover Amy sleeping, we realize when she wakes up that it was all a dream, and that’s why we were listening to this music from only the left — because as she was sleeping, she lost her right earbud. Right at the beginning, we tell the audience this is going to be a story told from her perspective: what she sees, what she hears, what she dreams of. And there’s this image of a fan turning with someone out of focus in front of it. We don’t know why yet. That’s what we like to do, this kind of storytelling where you don’t have the answers right away.