In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Robin Weigert looks back on her iconic performances in Deadwood and Big Little Lies, and how they connect to her current role in We Were the Lucky Ones.

When casting for Deadwood began, Robin Weigert didn’t have much screen work to show. She’d spent years grinding on the New York stage, with only a weepy Law & Order guest spot to put on a reel. But an old friend from graduate school, Julie Tucker, was a casting assistant on the buzzy HBO pilot, and carried just enough sway to give her a shot. Creator David Milch and his producers were searching everywhere to fill the demanding role of Calamity Jane, a lone wolf “who drove teams of oxen with a bull whip across the plains,” as Weigert describes her.

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They met Weigert in New York. “I tried to fill out the dimensions of this massively strong person, because I didn’t feel I was enough of me,” Weigert says. “I did the opposite of what actresses do. I made myself bigger in every way I could. Then the feedback came that they loved the vulnerability.”

Weigert winces a bit at this memory. She’d adjusted herself, her walk and her voice and her presence, to the fullest extent she was able; she wasn’t going for vulnerable. Yet she won the part anyway, going on to embody the indelible frontierswoman with both grit and heartbreak—and never letting the costume overtake the human.

Here was a fitting start to Weigert’s career in film and television, where she’s taken mostly supporting parts—lawyers, therapists, housewives, even demons—and imbued them with palpable poignancy. She commands a certain attention, one that reflects her current career philosophy. “I now believe in acting in a way I can stand behind,” she says. “I thought it was for vain people and narcissists when I was little. But my feeling about acting, unlike then, is that it’s an important thing.”

In We Were the Lucky Ones, currently streaming on Hulu, Weigert portrays Nechuma, the matriarch of the Kurcs, a Polish Jewish family brutally separated—whether in hiding, in capture, or in escape—over the course of World War II. During the series, Nechuma is wracked with guilt over her need to lean on her children for survival; the most recent episode, “Warsaw,” finds her physically separated from her ailing husband, Sol (Lior Ashkenazi), as they begin work in a new factory outside of the Polish capital. We see Nechuma’s spirit begin to break. While this story reaches a relatively happy ending—not exactly a spoiler if you see the show’s title—it remains rooted in historical trauma. You feel Weigert’s weighty journey in her performance.

“David Milch has a highfalutin word for this, which is the ‘transmutation of souls,’” says Weigert, who is Jewish. “This experience I’ve just had with We Were the Lucky Ones may be the zenith of having experienced that in my life. I also experienced it when I played Calamity Jane. I grew from my encounters with these characters. They changed me in fundamental ways.”

In her early teens, Weigert saw Sophie’s Choice and received an instant spark. “I was one child when I walked into the movie theater, and I was another person when I came out of it,” she says. Before reaching high school, she and a friend caught a bus to Georgetown, where Meryl Streep was in production on Heartburn opposite Jack Nicholson. They intended—and managed—to meet her. “There she was, going to her trailer, and [my friend] had the gumption to actually go up and give her a fan letter that he prepared for her,” Weigert recalls. “I just had the breath knocked out of me when she turned around.”

Fifteen or so years later, Weigert was sharing the stage with Streep in Central Park, in a 2001 production of The Seagull. Weigert had, to this point, understudied on Broadway and was just starting to make a name for herself in New York; now she was a brief replacement for Marcia Gay Harden in an ensemble that also included Streep, Kevin Kline, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Christopher Walken. “The two times that I got to go on were almost out of body,” Weigert says. The play was directed by Mike Nichols, who then brought Weigert into the casting process for his HBO adaptation of Angels in America—to read opposite all of the men being considered to play the part of Joe, a closeted Mormon, as his wife, Harper.

Weigert knew it was a long shot, but held out hope that he’d cast her after seeing her run through it a bunch of times. When the part went to Mary-Louise Parker, in an Emmy-winning turn, Weigert felt her heart drop. She cried all over New York. She wondered if she’d missed her big chance. (Nichols did, at least, cast her in a small part in the show.)

Deadwood came about the next year, a staggering introduction for viewers to Weigert’s talent. She was, in many ways, about as far from Calamity Jane as she could imagine. “Her way of dealing with her extreme shyness is to be balls out,” Weigert says. “She’s very extroverted with her shyness, which is a strange thing to say.”

In the first season, for which Weigert received an Emmy nomination, the actor went almost Daniel Day-Lewis–level Method. “I stayed in character all the time,” she says. She employed the Jerzy Grotowski acting technique, which “looks, to an outside eye, like you’re taking each joint and limb and touching or thrusting at where it stops, where it can no longer go any further.” Put another way, “I would just throw myself around to manage my own sense of scale because I didn’t want to play her small, even though I knew that the creature inside that she was protecting was a tiny, tiny child.” Here she identifies the vulnerability Milch was talking about. On the surface, Weigert’s work in Deadwood is all delicious bravado, chewing on Milch’s violent dialogue and stomping around the West as if Jane owns it. But you always see the terrified, lonely human being underneath.

Deadwood marked a major way into Hollywood, if also a somewhat limiting one. “When people don’t know you yet, they don’t know what to make of a performance like that,” Weigert says. Work came steadily, if not thrillingly, after HBO unceremoniously ended Deadwood at season three. She played a tough lawyer on Sons of Anarchy, a stern nun in Damien, and a no-BS handler in Chicago P.D. “People think I’m much tougher than I am,” Weigert says with a laugh. “This stamp of that first role has followed me in different ways.” In between, she found room for richer independent work, particularly her stirring performance in Concussion as an interior designer who experiences an abrupt sexual awakening after suffering a blow to the skull.

Then came Big Little Lies. In a cast filled with major, Oscar-winning stars, Weigert took on a role that, on paper, appeared functionary and minimal: the therapist to Nicole Kidman’s Celeste, who pushes her to acknowledge and leave an abusive marriage. Their scenes are electric due in large part to Weigert’s controlled presence. In some ways, it’s the opposite of a Calamity Jane—there’s no elaborate costuming or accent work going on here. In others, it’s a natural continuation. “I don’t think a psychoanalyst has a name for that thing that comes and joins the analyst in the room, but if they did, they could begin to think more creatively about psychotherapy,” Weigert says before sneaking in a smile. “We call it a character.”

Weigert agrees that these scenes crackle with unusual intensity. “Something was happening that’s so ineffable, it’s almost difficult to speak about it in an interview,” Weigert says. The late director Jean-Marc Vallée essentially left her and Kidman to their own devices, in some ways a return to that method that Weigert played around with on Deadwood. “His style was to say, if your impulse is to leave the room, leave the room. He shot some versions of the scene where [Nicole] left because I had triggered her,” Weigert says. “We went from one therapy scene to the next with nobody queuing us. We just continued. We stayed in character. If I was triggering a fight-or-flight response, I would get the immediate impact of that in the room in real time.”

Big Little Lies broke out as an Emmy-winning smash. In some ways things felt full-circle for Weigert: The show brought her back into Streep’s orbit for the second season, launched her higher up on casting lists, as her previous big HBO credit did—of late, she’s been a scene-stealer in one of the biggest shows on TV, CBS’s Tracker, and one of the biggest movies in theaters, 2022’s Smile—and got her in touch with that deeper experience of acting, of feeling its impact beyond the set. “Members of the psychoanalytic community reached out to me in all kinds of ways,” she says. Weigert appeared on psychology podcasts and wrote an article for an academic journal, sharing her own journey of playing a therapist in such a delicate situation. She felt the impact, though her next big TV role would hit her even harder.

Near the end of the We Were the Lucky Ones shoot, Weigert met a woman named Anna, the real-life granddaughter of her character in the show. Weigert asked Anna for stories about Nechuma, and Anna told her about the intense grief she remembered observing in her grandmother. The anecdote hit Weigert as if she’d gone through it herself. “It washed over me as a sequence of memories, like things I had lived,” she says. Scenes shot from the show rushed back to her. “We made this bridge somehow across maybe three generations of time. It was one of the most gorgeous experiences.”

In a rarity for a large-scale Hollywood production, the entire Kurc family is played by Jewish actors, including Logan Lerman and Joey King as Nechuma’s middle and youngest child, respectively. Weigert grew up culturally, casually Jewish—her brother placed a Star of David atop their family Christmas tree—but has tended to resist one-to-one identity markers when it comes to casting and performance. “No one would guess that me at 12 was part of what was inside of Calamity Jane, but there is a texture of that struggling kid in her that I captured,” she argues. “Acting as I perceive it is accessing things that are a mystery, sometimes even to us, about who we are.”

But she noticed something on We Were the Lucky Ones. In an early table read, commonalities appeared across a truly international cast. “We all had, let’s just say, somebody in all of our families who was a hoarder—and you went, Why is that?” she says. “Forced diaspora and other things create this holding on to what you’ve got to the point where it becomes obsessive. It was little markers like that where I’d say, ‘Holy…this is a group I’m a member of.’”

This extended to the actual experience of playing Nechuma. “I’ve never had the Nazis come to my door and say, ‘You’ve got half an hour to get out and leave everything that was yours behind’—I’ve never had that in my life,” Weigert says. “But it was as if I had when we played that. It was this blood memory. Things were rising up in me that I didn’t know were in there, that connect deeply to identity.”

She thinks a bit harder about this example. “I am not saying there’s only one way to access it,” she says. We’ve talked about her finding such dramatically different ways into Deadwood, Big Little Lies, We Were the Lucky Ones, and the dozens of projects in between. But Weigert always finds something. “It’s about connecting to the feelings that wake up inside you,” she says. The gift comes in sharing them with us.