Anyone who watched Sharp Objects on HBO this summer is well aware that the show’s young star, Eliza Scanlen, has an enormously promising future ahead of her. Asked to play both sugar and spice as Amy Adams’s complicated younger sister, Amma Crellin, Scanlen revealed incredible versatility and depth over the course of eight episodes. An Australian native and only 19 years old, the actress not only executed a convincing American accent, but learned how to roller skate after landing the Sharp Objects role—and got good at it fast enough to glide effortlessly through a majority of her scenes in the series.

For her next project, Greta Gerwig’s star-studded Little Women, Scanlen has some new homework: piano practice. She’ll be playing the winsome Beth March—a far cry from Amma—opposite Emma Watson’s Meg, Saoirse Ronan’s Jo, and Florence Pugh’s Amy. Scanlen spoke with VF.com several weeks ago about working with Gerwig, and then again about that twist-filled Sharp Objects finale this week, for Vanity Fair’s companion podcast, Still Watching.

Vanity Fair: What can you tell me about working on Little Women?

Eliza Scanlen: I’m playing Beth, which is super exciting. At the moment, I’m just trying to play the piano two to three hours a day. Greta wants me to learn quite a few songs. I’m working on that. I’ve played piano since I was probably six or seven, but I stopped when I was about 13, and I couldn’t be bothered to do the exams or learn my scales. Now I’m coming back to it, and it feels good. It’s exciting to finally be working on a new character, and a character that’s so different from Amma. I’m excited.

I always love to ask people what goes into their makeup when they have to look sick for a role. You get majorly poisoned in the second-to-last episode of Sharp Objects. How did you achieve that ghastly look?

Well, what I can remember is foundation that’s probably a few too many shades too light, and they had a spray bottle of water on hand. In between takes, they’d spray me, so I always had this layer of sweat. Weird thing is when you do get all of that makeup on, you really do feel gross, so it’s a good little tool to get into character. Even the vomiting scenes. I remember the potion for the vomit was Gatorade mixed up with soggy biscuits—like little salt crackers, mashed-up salt crackers. Yeah, movie magic, I guess.

You have to act two different kinds of drugged as well in the show, both in Episode 6, when partying, and then later, when poisoned. How did you put those two different dazed performances together?

I kind of just winged it. I’m not into drugs or anything like that, so I was looking up videos of people on drugs. Yeah, I just think my main goal for those two different kinds of drugs was to find a distinction behind her attitude toward them. When she went roller-skating with Camille, I think her high was very different. It was filled with excitement and pleasure, and she was really happy to be in that state. I think with the other drugs, there’s a kind of complacency that she carries, and I wanted to portray that in the way that she moved around the house. I wanted to make it seem like she had been here before, and that she had resigned to this state of sickness, and almost this understanding that if she were to die, she would be O.K. with it—to see Amma give up, and to really see her struggling.

Spoilers for the Sharp Objects Finale Ahead

Knowing that you were playing a murderer throughout the season, were there any points where director Jean-Marc Vallée was like, “O.K., tone it down. Less murder-y.” How do you calibrate that performance?