From her very first moments on screen, Maeve—dressed in slightly anachronistic and shocking pink—makes a bold impression on both Westworld viewers and visitors to the park alike. A great deal of care went into the host’s costumes in Westworld, because, for the most part, they would be the only costumes these characters would wear for the duration of the show. But while Dolores’s blue dress, Hector’s hand-tooled hat, and the Man in Black’s, well, blacks immediately translate as archetypal, Newton is eager to add her cranberry silk saloon dress to the pile. “Iconic,” she says of Maeve’s heavily accessorized madam look.

“They should always stand out amongst the scenery of these dusty backgrounds,” costume designer Trish Summerville says of Maeve and her protege, Clementine (Angela Sarafyan). “They’re kind of like the candy of the town. You want them to pop, and you want them to draw attention. Maeve pops.” But though Maeve may stand out visually right away, it took a few episodes for her character to entirely coalesce. Given Westworld’s unorthodox approach to shooting Season 1, that’s no wonder.

Unlike a typical audition process, Thandie Newton’s introduction to Westworld didn’t come via reading a script. Before seeing a single line of dialogue, the actress met with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy via Skype to discuss broader themes and ideas from the show. This was only the first step in what would prove to be an unusual process for every member of the cast—especially for Newton. Scripts came through eventually, of course, but the actors on Westworld were kept entirely in the dark about how the season would unfold—a process the Westworld actors have described as equal parts frustrating and delightful. Though she says the showrunners always had “the whole season firmly in their grasp,” Newton herself got to discover some of the show’s more dramatic twists—“oh my God, and the moment when Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) realized that he was a fucking robot!”—the same way a fan would.

Given how often they had to play confusion or shocked surprise, operating without the larger picture in mind may have only enhanced the work both Newton and Wood were doing. But Newton says that for the first half of the season, she was only playing “fragments” of a woman who had to keep waking herself up over and over again—Groundhog Day-style—to the truths around her. “Because she is coming into consciousness, she’s discovering things about herself, as the audience are,” Newton says before revealing the Episode 6 scene that, for her, turned Maeve into a fully realized character.

Having learned some truths about her robotic nature, Maeve, in perhaps the show’s most meta moment, forces one of the park’s techs, Felix (Leonardo Nam) to show her around the Delos Corp. lab. “Maeve is walking around looking at the artistry of how the hosts have created it,” Newton describes. “She realizes the full extent of what they are as creations, and that they’re not human. I mean, that's just such a betrayal.” Here, Newton delivers one of the season’s most arresting bits of acting once again without the benefit of an actor’s usual bag of tricks. Maeve not only has no dialogue, but also has to keep her features relatively still as she pretends to be a catatonic robot, all while absorbing the earth-shattering reality of her own existence—including seeing footage of the pastel-clad homesteader version of herself in a Delos commercial.