"I have loved Kate Mulgrew for years. So for me, it was like she had the authority that Red had to have. Mulgrew is just a formidable actress. She came in and her hair was blonde and shoulder length and she was very put together. She read and she was amazing. She's very intimidating. I think she's so good at her job. She was lovely and she kicked ass. She scared the hell out of me in the reading.

She read the tit punch where she's trying to get in with the other Russian woman where they're mean to her, and the scene with her husband where he tells her, by punching her breast implant, they're now screwed. It's an emotional scene because she's kind of blowing him off in the beginning, but then she gets very vulnerable because she has to admit, They didn't want me. They don't like my jokes. They don't like me. So it was a hard scene, a very hard scene that really ranged emotions and she was fantastic. To me, I was like, That's it, because Red has to have the vulnerability, but also had to be able to run a kitchen with a look.

That whole scene with Piper with the yogurt, that's what I kept picturing when I would think of Red. How's that going to play? And as soon as Kate came in, I was like, She's going to nail that. She's the loveliest woman, but she's intimidating! Her accents were perfect. Originally, I think Red was Greek — they changed it to Russian — so she read it doing a Greek accent, but obviously she can do any dialect we needed.

I had to tell her manager, 'Look, she's going to really have to change her look for this. Is she down?' And she was like, 'Yeah! She's down with it.'"