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Maura Tierney made her mark on American audiences with her long-running roles on ER (1999) and NewsRadio (1995), but it’s her recent work as Helen Solloway on Showtime’s The Affair (2014) which resulted in her first-ever Golden Globe nomination for a television performance.

Tierney has found success on The Affair by identifying her own perspective on the show’s ultimate theme. Deeper and more profound than the basic act of adultery, she says “the show is about the darker nature of us as people and what happens when we tap into that in ourselves—Do we acknowledge it or not acknowledge it, and what do we do with it once we acknowledge it? So, grief, fear, desire, lust all of these things, it’s more about that, I think, than just infidelity. It’s about deeper, darker kinds of urges.”

The Affair won the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series after its freshman season. For the show’s second season, the writers shifted its point of view to tell the story from the perspectives of different characters in the series’ principal cast. This change modified the events as we witness them, since, as in real life, different people interpret and react to occurrences in different ways. Season two gave Tierney’s character a chance to truly shine and explore the events of her life in a new way, exploring her journey more intensely as she works to emerge from the trauma of the affair while managing her life as a parent. The result was exceptional. As Decider writes, “Maura Tierney is more than an actress on The Affair—She’s a magician.”

Continuing that thought, they write, “In season one, we only saw Helen through the eyes of her unhappy husband and his mistress. She is either a cold, un-supportive shrew, a snobbish rich girl, or a devastated victim begging for her husband back. This season, she is a glorious reflection of the demands made upon the modern woman to be chic, nurturing, wise, and still sexy in the face of turmoil… Maura Tierney’s career has been defined by a rather understated majesty. Whether she’s doing comedy or drama, she has the oddly spellbinding ability to make loud and crazy emotions seem not only commonplace, but subdued. She doesn’t ever give in to histrionic displays, but rather she lets everything she’s thinking and feeling flit across her face with the slightest of telling twitches. And this is where she deeply understands the mission of acting: it’s not a performance so much as an expression of truth. We keep most of our heartache, passion, humor, judgment, and sorrow tied down under the surface. Tierney knows how to do this while still communicating everything rumbling within.”

As for how Tierney helped mold the character of Helen, the actress isn’t taking any credit. “The writers wrote a very complex, really interesting woman and allowed her to be out of control,” she told Pop Crunch. “We’d talk about it with the writers but I would say the character was created in the room and then I got to do it.”

The hardest part of the role, she says, is, “playing the mom of four kids. I don’t really know much about that. My sister has kids, and I can ask her things, but that part, I don’t know anything about, so that’s what I worry is going to feel authentic. It’s daunting an actress playing a mother with four kids.”

The Affair’s stylistic setup also makes for challenging days on the set. Continuing with Pop Crunch, she says, “It’s really hard to jump back and forth in time. Sometimes we’ll be filming future present and at another time we’ll be shooting the future, which is where the courtroom scenes are. Then your character will be in Noah’s flashback, or Alison’s flashback, and it’s a little hard to keep track of that, and to know what you’re doing, so that gets tricky.”

Pulling it off with style, the veteran actress shows she can keep up with the series’ demands. Complicated timelines, dark drama, nudity, sex, and language are all part of The Affair’s very adults-only subject matter. Tierney’s career has been a success for years, and her Golden Globe win for The Affair will only work to her validation as the years continue.