Any actor’s CV can be distilled to a few key roles. In Carla Gugino's case, it’s hard to narrow down her signature parts from the 100-plus TV shows, movies and plays she’s been in a career spanning three decades.

Folks of a certain age might remember her on Michael J Fox’s workplace comedy Spin City; others from a younger generation might know her from Sin City. Protean and prolific, she's been in action (Watchmen), comedies (Entourage), sci-fi (Wayward Pines), drama (Political Animals), and horror (The Haunting of Hill House).

Frankly, she’s fine not being known for any single role, the 47-year-old American tells 8 DAYS recently. She simply loves the transformational aspects of her vocation, hiding behind different characters in different genres.

“I enjoy mixing the roles up, taking risks and trying different things,” she adds. “I don’t think I prefer one genre over another; I’m always on the lookout for a director with vision, a great character, and a wonderful piece of material.”

And it’s in the just-concluded Cinemax series Jett that Gugino, a Meryl Streep fan ( I saw Silkwood and Sophie's Choice when I was 13 and that was when I decided to be an actress ), found a project which ticked all three boxes.

In the nine-part crime drama, created by Sebastian Gutiérrez — who happens to be Gugino’s longtime boyfriend — she plays Daisy ‘Jett’ Kowalski, a retired thief who’s, er, persuaded, by Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito's mob boss to do another job.

What I love about Jett is that she doesn't give away a lot, says Gugino. It takes quite a while to understand her and ultimately she is not Robin Hood. She's very good at her job and very committed to what she does.

Calling us from the set of her latest movie, Gunpowder Milkshake (more of that in a bit) in Berlin, the versatile performer tells us more about her shifty alter-ego…

1. She has never read a character like Jett.

“It’s interesting that in the golden age of television, even though there are wonderful roles for women of all ages, there’s still a double standard in [the depiction of] the female anti-hero,” says Gugino. “We have male anti-heroes like Walter White [from Breaking Bad] or Ray Donovan. But when a woman is an anti-hero, when she isn’t following the rules of conventional society, there has to be a reason. Does she have a strange health condition? Was she abused? So it was really interesting to play someone who doesn’t make those excuses. Women by nature tend to be introspective, they look inside and analyse things, but Jett doesn’t do that. She’s very much a women but like Lee Marvin from Point Blank or a young Clint Eastwood. She’s really pragmatic and straight forward and there’s something very interesting in exploring that kind of woman.”

2. It isn’t easy playing an anti-hero, though.

Because Jett keeps things to herself, the biggest challenge portraying her was “showing less emotions, not giving away what she is feeling.” “My face is expressive,” says Gugino. “I’m Italian, so I move my hands a lot. So to play someone who is stoic and restrained was really interesting. And what’s the easiest part? “When you have great dialogue,” she quips. “It’s much easier to remember. You can have one poorly written line and it’s almost impossible to remember it. Or you can have an entire speech that’s really well-written but you can memorise it very quickly. In this case, Sebastian [Gutierrez] is so good with his dialogue; I love its musicality. The way it was written made it easy to say. Jett speaks very little relative to the other characters, but when she speaks, what she says really counts.”

3. She does most of her own stunts on Jett.

“Jett is very kick-ass for sure,” says Gugino. “But a lot of thing she does is as a thief. She is very much about slipping in and out [undetected]; she is about being stealthy, almost invisible. I definitely learnt how to be quiet when sneaking in and out of places. Still, I did do a little rappelling off a building. It was fun to be able to do that.” But she promises that her next movie, Gunpowder Milkshake, an action thriller she’s currently filming in Berlin with Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett, Lena Headey, and Karen Gillan, is a more high-octane beast.“ I did a lot of stunt training [for that movie] because I have a lot of full-out action sequences, which are very different from the ones on Jett, a bit more extreme.”

4. She isn’t ready to be a director. Not yet at least.

“I’ve been asked to direct over the years,” says Gugino. Did she consider directing an ep or two of Jett? “Sebastian has a clear vision of what’s he creating, so we already have the best director for the job. I do see myself mostly as an interpreter who takes a piece of material as an actor and making it better than the writer and the director have imagined. ]. If there is a story only I can tell, then would I consider directing it. At this point, I love producing,” says Gugino, who’s also the show’s EP. “I’m a people-person, so I really like to assemble a team of creative people; I was very involved in the casting on Jett. I feel that my skill-set is [in that area]. That being said, never say never. We might be having this conversation in 10 years when I’m directing my first film. Then you’ll remind me that you asked this question,” she says, with a chuckle.

5. This year is the 30th anniversary of her feature film debut! Congrats!

Gugino was 17 when she made her feature acting debut in Troop Beverly Hills. The 1989 comedy stars Shelley Long as a socialite supervising a bunch of girl scouts, one of them is played by Gugino. “One of my favourite things is looking at the end credits, knowing every single person who’d worked on that movie or TV show,” she says. “That’s when you become aware that the movie/TV show would not have been possible without every one of them. I have a half-brother and a half-sister but I was raised mostly as an only child and I never did team sports growing up. [Troop Beverly Hills] was the first movie I worked on. I got to know the cast and crew really well. It was the first time I understood that movie-making is [a team sport] — a team of artistes making something together. That was a cool realisation at that point of my life.”

Catch the first season of Jett on HBO Go (via Toggle).

Photos: HBO, TPG News/Click Photos, Karen Gillan/Instagram