In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Fiona Shaw guides us through her film flops and triumphs, and all the Phoebe Waller-Bridge shows in between—culminating in her standout turn on Bad Sisters: “I feel I’m just starting in film and television and I’m loving it.”

Fiona Shaw winces, covering her eyes in horror as I read what she told The New York Times back in 1989: “All I know is that I awake every morning thinking the hourglass is running out.” Shaw reels back in anguish, reaching for a nearby Sharpie, drawing what looks like a surgeon’s incision line across her neck. “It’s not that I feel old,” her past self continues, “but that I think there is something I must say, something I must do before I die.”

Wiping away some of the permanent marker with her hand, Shaw looks relieved, yet squeamish. “Aren’t you glad you’re not meeting that woman now?” she asks. The 31-year-old version of herself was very motivated; Shaw also seems to think she was a bit much. “Maybe at that time, the careers for men were so much better that I was so pleased to have one…so I suspect the intensity came from that,” she says. That and: “When you’re being interviewed, you want to say very important things. I’ve stopped trying to do that.”

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At 66, Shaw may be more self-aware—but she still can’t help but bring a grainy Zoom screen to life. She is spirited and warm, talking animatedly with her hands, scurrying out of frame to retrieve an Amazon package (“Just one second—it’s my garden bulbs!”), and despite herself, often sharing profound insights about her life on stage and screen.

Shaw presents a similar frenetic energy to season two of the Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters. She plays brash, meddling church lady Angelica, who is eager to become an honorary sister in the Garvey family after one of their own tragically dies. “Angelica wants love. And of course she wants love from the wrong people,” says Shaw. “From her husband, who obviously didn’t want her; from her brother, who wishes she wasn’t there; and from a group of sisters, who are entirely self-contained. That’s the story of many people’s lives, possibly my own,” she adds with a laugh.

Perhaps that’s why Shaw immersed herself so fully in Angelica, going so far as to wear a “not-so-harsh version” of the metal chains that her character fastens to her bare upper leg as a form of religious penance. “If anything, I probably should have been a bit creepier,” she says. “But I celebrated every bit—her adoration of rabbits, her religiosity, and her slightly pretending to be married to her brother. Because at least it’s a man in your life when you’ve been deserted by your husband.”

The fifth episode of Bad Sisters season two ends in shocking fashion. While sailing the sea with some of the Garveys, Angelica warns the family to steer clear of their new brother-in-law, Ian. Her advice has some merit, but just as she delivers it, the boom of the sailboat swings around and smacks Angelica into the choppy currents, sending her to her presumed death. “That’s the other thing about a chaotic character like Angelica,” says Shaw. “She picks up true things as well as false things. She sometimes has the wrong end of the stick and sometimes the right end, but you never know on what day she’s got them.”

Shaw was cast in part, series creator and star Sharon Horgan previously told Vanity Fair, because she’s given great comedic performances in Fleabag and the Harry Potter films. But Shaw generally resists classifying her projects by genre, instead focusing on playing each character with acuity. “By showing your wit, which is really the point of view of the character, you’re coming in at an angle and the audience gets it or they don’t. And if they get it,” she says with a grin, “they’re complicit with you. That’s a very pleasant feeling.”

Standout screen work, including recent roles as Diego Luna’s adoptive mother Maarva on Andor and wise survivalist Rose on True Detective: Night Country, litter her résumé. But few things give the Irish-born Shaw more pride than her time in the theater. After training at the esteemed Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the ’70s and early ’80s, Shaw performed in classics across stages in London and New York—including As You Like It, Hedda Gabler, The Taming of the Shrew, Medea, and Electra—earning two Olivier Awards and a Tony nomination along the way. But it is the mention of her controversial 1995 turn as Richard II that springs Shaw into action.

She triumphantly lifts her arms in the air, then hoists up her laptop to show me a wall lined with photos of Shaw performing onstage in that gender-bending production, which has a special place in her heart: “They had it in for us before it even opened. And Richard II isn’t really a man. He’s a sort of girl or a God. So I did it precisely because it was female. I didn’t want to play a man. In some way, we were treading on the toes of British-English history. I’m very proud to have done it, but it was quite difficult to do at the time.”

Shaw was similarly thrilled to shoot My Left Foot, the Oscar-winning 1989 film about Irish artist Christy Brown (Daniel Day-Lewis). But it’s the following year’s historical epic Mountains of the Moon that she considers her first “really proper Hollywood film.” Despite misgivings, she soon came to the US and starred in the 1990 sequel to Three Men and a Baby. “I did Three Men and a Little Lady, which probably ruined my career,” she says. “Because once I played that character, it was so popular that nobody cast me as anything else.”

A few big-budget studio films that fell short of expectations followed. “I pride myself in the theater on picking only the things that I think have something to say,” says Shaw. “But of course, I had no judgment about film.”

She laughs when I bring up two prime examples—1993’s live-action Super Mario Bros., in which she played love interest to Dennis Hopper’s King Koopa, and 1998’s The Avengers, which cast Shaw as one of the baddies. “There was every reason to believe Super Mario Bros. would be a fantastic film,” says Shaw of the beleaguered production, which went through multiple rewrites. Not so for The Avengers. “The Avengers was absolutely a terrible film. We did a lot of night shooting and the producers were always sort of playing golf out the back,” she says, mimicking a swing. “It was quite strange, that film.”

Flops or no, Shaw easily could have stuck around in Hollywood and found her footing. “Any actress of that age would’ve just stayed in LA and made a brilliant film career,” she says. “But I was trained for something else.” So she took a more circuitous route, balancing screen work with theater—though she has no regrets about her late-bloomer status. “It’s like being 21 again, because I’m being offered fantastic roles and able to use all the skills that I’ve learned over those years in them,” says Shaw. “I feel I’m just starting in film and television and I’m loving it.”

As time passed, Shaw found herself more willingly lured from the stage to screen. “I was always a bit tired from the theater. I was dying for somebody to offer me a film all the time,” she says. “But of course, I was never available very much.”

Shaw was often treading the boards when she’d get whisked away for a movie. She was performing Julius Caesar in London when Brian De Palma asked her to play twisted matriarch Ramona in 2006’s The Black Dahlia, a film inspired by the grisly real-life 1947 murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner). “Don’t you find this quite frightening?” Shaw remembers asking De Palma. His response? “‘I’ve been doing this since 1962. Nothing frightens me.’” Says Shaw, “That film had a rather mixed reception, but at least it was a big idea.”

Five years later, as she was performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, another auteur came calling. “Terry Malick rang me up and said, ‘Hello. Would you like to help me with my film?’” Shaw remembers. “You think, What a lovely way of speaking—‘help my film.’ And of course, you just want to help him do anything. You’d help him sweep the floor.” Or work alongside Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in what would become his Oscar-nominated 2011 film The Tree of Life.

Shaw was rehearsing for Medea when summoned to meet for two other films—one a period romance produced by Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, the other an adaptation about a boy wizard. “And I thought, Well, I’ll get one. I suppose I’d prefer Bertolucci’s—probably more me. Idiot I was.”

Shaw instead nabbed both roles, and spent the next decade playing Harry Potter’s embittered Aunt Petunia across five films. “You couldn’t conceive of the success of these things,” she says. “Harry Potter, it’s a kind of religion. So it was a phenomenal privilege. I was in a very special section with Richard Griffiths and the two children, Harry Melling, and, of course, Harry Potter [Daniel Radcliffe], together in kitchens year in, year out. I had very little to do with the school scenes, except to have lunch with Maggie Smith or Alan Rickman, who are my friends. Mainly it was very well organized. The effect of it was way in excess of my feeling about it.”

In 2011, Shaw traded one mystical realm for another by joining season four of HBO’s True Blood as Marnie Stonebrook, a medium and leader of a Wiccan coven. While filming in Los Angeles, she dove headfirst into “various witchy things,” including seances. “You leave your name at the door, then somebody comes out and says, ‘Is there anybody here called Fiona?’ And you go, ‘Oh, how do they know it was me?’ Because you signed in,” Shaw says. “However, if somebody’s willing to give you the experience of meeting your great-uncle, and the desire is there, it’s amazing what is conjured. I’m not sure we need to just be scientific about the evidence for the existence of the world. We’re more poetical as creatures.”

Shaw sees her four seasons on Killing Eve—where she played vigilant M16 Russia desk head Carolyn Martens—as a career turning point. The role earned Shaw a BAFTA TV Award for best supporting actress, as well as two Emmy nominations; it was also the first project where she could totally pull back in her performance, trusting that the audience would find her. “The long form of television has given me what my big productions gave me, which is a chance to develop characters,” says Shaw. “To get better at them, to live them, and to have the confidence that the thing is already accepted—you’re onto something that people want to see.”

That gig catapulted her into series creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s other dark comedy about women on the edge. The four minutes and 20 seconds she spent playing a therapist on Fleabag is all it took for Shaw to earn a guest-acting Emmy nomination—and to convince the show’s fractured heroine that she did, in fact, “want to fuck the priest,” thank you very much. “Phoebe Waller-Bridge is somebody you just want to go around carrying in a palanquin,” says Shaw. “She’s so talented, so kind, so full of fun, and so truly herself.” At the start of Fleabag’s therapy session, Shaw’s character makes the bold choice to intensely lather her limbs in lotion. “The whole thing of the arms—that was all her,” she says of Waller-Bridge. “I was doing it quite modestly. She said, ‘No, really go for it.’”

As we near the end of our conversation, Shaw shares a quote of her own, from Booker Prize–winning author Michael Ondaatje: “‘You must never repeat an emotion.’ You must move.” That’s also true of acting, as well as living itself, says Shaw. “Because even as you are talking to me today, Savannah, we are different people than we were yesterday. There are certain shapes and agreed tropes that we carry, but if you’ve learned anything since yesterday, it’s that you’re slightly different today,” she says. “There is no static character. That has been very freeing for me.”

Perhaps this is why Shaw squirms when reminded of who she once was. She’s still passionate and hardworking about the craft she’s devoted her life to, but less precious about what it all amounts to. Has she at least gotten close to meeting the lofty goal she set for herself all those years ago in 1989? “I have not said it. I also don’t feel I need to have said it,” Shaw says. “Maybe the aspiration is more important than the achievement.”