Were you nervous going into a part like this?
Not nervous exactly. You always have to search to find the character and for the pilot I felt that, for me, the scene at the core for her was the scene at her son's school where she's talking to Ellen and telling her to never have children and all that. That was the key scene and I took it to a coach I've known for many years and it helps.

I play these amazing women who are nothing like me and I can become intimidated when I'm confronted with these characters. If I was sitting across from them I'd be like, "What do I say now?", so I find it helps to take them to someone and break through the barrier of that. Then you get the little bits of things. For that particular scene and what was key and just so Patty Hewes was that she left Ellen not knowing if what she said was true or if it was just bullshit.

What's your opinion of Patty?
It's very different for me to be in a series where I don't know what the end is. And the writers, for reasons that I fully understand, keep their options open because they potentially have six seasons to write. So I don't even know about her mother or her father, so when you ask me how do I like her, it usually goes back to knowing where someone has come from that helps me answer. But knowing about Patty has made it sometimes difficult to play her because she's tough.

And it must be easy to fall into the trap of playing her as a bitch.
Yeah, which is not interesting. There's a lot to her - you meet her husband, her son. I think it's wonderful that her marriage is really authentic and interesting. There are lots of elements to her life that give her more. But the bitch element is interesting too because she's just acting like a man, she's not necessarily a bitch.

In a lot of interviews you've had to make the point that you're a nice person. Because of some of the roles you're known for do you have to defend yourself?
I think for some reason I've played these women in my career. Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction and the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons. They're huge characters, great characters, beautifully written, and I think people like that kind of dangerous woman and people like to see me in those roles.

But I have to be careful that that's not all I do. I recognise that and going into Patty Hewes was very interesting because the writers, when they first talked to me about the role, were using a very powerful male lawyer as their template. I said to them you can't do that because as soon as you make it into a woman everything changes.

It was interesting to me because I wanted to play a woman who had succeeded in a man's profession and had gotten to the top of her game and was totally in control. And that's rare because even in New York where I've met some amazing women, they're not at the top. It’s interesting to see what power has done to this woman and how she deals with it. The story is about what power does to people.