Over the course of her decades-long career, Anna Chlumsky has played everyone from a tough-as-hell preteen in My Girl to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ right-hand woman in Veep. But Vivian Kent, the ambitious, obsessive journalist at the center of Inventing Anna, is a role she’s always wanted to tackle. 

“I was always really interested in playing a journalist because I just kind of admired the ability to ask whatever you want,” she told Elle in a Feb. 9 profile. “​​I was always interested in hotspot journalism and war time and stuff like that. And then when this [job] came in, I was like, ‘Oh.’ This is more akin to who I’ve met my whole life.” 

In Inventing Anna, the upcoming series about Anna Delvey, a so-called fake heiress who conned her way into an elite Manhattan art scene, Vivian serves as the audience’s conduit into Delvey’s universe. Her own motivations are layered: For one, she wants to rebuild her professional image in the wake of a prior mishap that threatened her reputation. For another, she’s pregnant, and she also wants to write the story of her career before having her firstborn. But as she’s sucked into Anna’s world, she becomes fascinated by her story and invested in her fate.

As a six-time Emmy nominee with a career dating back to 1991, Chlumsky isn’t new to working with journalists, and getting into Vivian’s head helped her find the humanity in the writer-subject relationship. “What I’ve been realizing on this press tour is, it weirdly is therapeutic that I played this type of a journalist,” she told Elle. “It is helping me break down the defenses a little. Be human to human, as opposed to just going, ‘Oh, you’re just out to get me.’ You know what I mean?”

You can watch Vivian’s unconventional writer-subject relationship with Anna unfold on Feb. 11.