“I am a little exhausted of playing crazy women,” Arquette had earlier confessed to a panel at a Television Critics Association presentation to promote The Act. In addition to the mental and emotional toll of getting inside two such ferociously complex characters, she’d transformed herself physically, gaining 40 pounds to play Tilly, and keeping much of it on for Dee Dee. Various people she was close to, Arquette told me later, people she loves, tried to convince her that the weight gain wasn’t necessary, that she could wear a fat suit instead. They were worried about how deglamorizing herself might affect her career. But Tilly—who in the series is embroiled in relationships with both of the inmates whose escape she helps facilitate—had a number of sex scenes, and Arquette wanted them to be as authentic as possible.

“I want to have these conversations about women being sexual who don’t have that certain Hollywood body type,” she said when we talked a few hours after the panel, inadvertently quenching some of the glamour of her scarlet gown by hunching all the way over the table toward the audio recorder until she’s almost supine. “If you look around you in the real world, does everyone look like that? Aren’t we supposed to be telling the stories of human beings?”

This push-pull, between the industry wanting Arquette to be one thing—a luminously blond, almost feline movie star—and Arquette wanting, well, more, has defined the course of her career. For every concession she makes, there’s a correction. In her first major role in 1987, while still a teenager, she played the wholesome ingenue drop-kicking Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. A few years later came an Edith Wharton adaptation, Ethan Frome. She’s been the exuberant, adorable call girl in True Romance. A grieving mother who somehow becomes a freedom fighter in Burma in Beyond Rangoon. Not one but two femme fatales in David Lynch’s psychosexual neo-noir thriller, Lost Highway. In Charlie Kaufman’s Human Nature, Arquette portrayed a woman whose hormonal disorder left her covered in thick body hair. In Little Nicky, she was the genial love interest to Adam Sandler’s gurning, adolescent demon. In Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, she did what for many actors would be unthinkable—she let audiences watch her visibly age over the course of 12 years, in a role for which she won her first Academy Award.

For the 30-plus years Arquette has been acting, critics haven’t always known how to respond. A male journalist profiling her for The Independent in 2000 observed something “unpredictable and Lorena Bobbitty” within Arquette’s performances, concluding that “the male characters who come into contact with her never seem to know whether they should snog her or jump on to a chair and scream.” Roger Ebert, a palpable fan, seemed enamored of most everything she did, although he was frequently dubious about the material she was attached to. (Of the ill-fated Catholicism-meets-body-horror movie Stigmata, he wrote, “Arquette is vulnerable and touching in an impossible role.”)

More recently, though, television’s artistic renaissance—and its willingness to tackle complex stories about older women—has offered Arquette some truly challenging characters, roles in which she can physically and emotionally transform herself. She was nervous about playing Tilly, a frowsy, painfully drab character who defies sympathy. She didn’t know whether people were ready to engage with characters like Tilly: ordinary-looking, middle-aged women having affairs, being depressed, and being lonely. “It’s a vulnerable thing, to act,” she said. “And there’s a very narrow definition of what’s acceptable.” The performance she gave in Dannemora was arguably her most spectacular work to date. Tilly is a toothache of a character, inflamed and unpleasant and raw. But her need is so desperate and encompassing that it’s hard to tear your gaze away.