In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. To launch our new season, Carla Gugino reflects on 30-plus years of acting on stage and screen—and how, between The Fall of the House of Usher and The Girls on the Bus, she’s finally being seen in a new light.

Over the years, Carla Gugino has gotten used to being called underrated and underused. (Even in a recent Vanity Fair review.) “Throughout my career, so many people have written that,” she recalls with a smirk. That’s saying something, since she’s been a working actor for more than three decades now.

Gugino knew from a very young age—she secured legal emancipation at age 16 to pursue her career—that she would never be a “flash in the pan” kind of star. Moving around as a kid between her separated (and unconventional) parents, gaining wisdom well beyond her years, she always saw the long game. Small, even thin parts still matter, though it can take a while for observers to realize that: “Only within the last less than 10 years, probably closer to five years, has mine been considered a body of work.”

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Take this particular moment. Gugino stars in The Girls on the Bus, a frothy dramedy following a group of political correspondents on the presidential campaign trail. (The first two episodes are now streaming on Max.) Our guide into this world, Melissa Benoist’s wide-eyed Sadie, bonds with the other ambitious women in their 30s riding across the country, but Gugino emerges as the series’ jagged heart. She portrays Sadie’s mentor, Grace, a seasoned reporter whose weary cynicism is tempered by her openness. It’s a showcase that you sense Gugino feels in her bones, an industry veteran who’s seen it all and knows how the game is played. It’s the kind of part reserved for a performer with the gravitas to sell that legacy.

Ironically, it’s maybe the first Hollywood category that has ever fit Gugino. She was a 20-something when she played the mother of tweens in Spy Kids. Then she was a lesbian parole officer in Sin City, a porn star in Elektra Luxx, and just about everything under the sun in Mike Flanagan’s horror-lit universe, from The Haunting of Hill House to The Fall of the House of Usher. “People really get confused by me,” Gugino says with a laugh. “I learned quite young that anytime I said, ‘I never want to do blah, blah, blah,’ then I would end up with an opportunity that would actually be kind of wonderful doing blah, blah, blah—and I would be eating my own words. So I decided to stop saying that.”

When Gugino came to Los Angeles as a teenager, she always had a change of clothes in the backseat of her car. She kept a stash of power bars around for quick meals. She’d go out on auditions after school finished in the afternoon. “I had one line on Who’s the Boss? and I was so excited to have it,” Gugino says. “That wasn’t my end game, but quite quickly, I was able to start to support myself.” When she nabbed the part of one of Shelley Long’s Wilderness Girls in 1989’s Troop Beverly Hills, Gugino realized she could make it on her own. She also started learning about the business’s weirder traditions. When guesting on The Wonder Years in 1991, “Fred Savage was in school, so he would do his coverage and then he would leave. We had a kissing scene: We did the master [shot] with the two of us in it, we did his coverage, and then we turned around onto my coverage—and I walk in and all I see is an x on a light stand,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m going to lean in and kiss the x because he’s at school.’”

Despite thriving in guest spots on sitcoms like Saved by the Bell and Doogie Howser, MD, Gugino balked at acting opposite Pauly Shore in the schticky 1993 comedy two-hander, Son in Law, before swallowing her pride—and proving herself as a deadpan powerhouse. “I was like, ‘I’m a serious actress.’ I had these prejudices about that kind of silly comedy,” she says. “I ended up, of course, having an amazing time. It’s become one of the movies that people still come up to me about the most.” Two years later, she starred opposite Mira Sorvino in the handsomely mounted The Buccaneers miniseries for Masterpiece Theatre, adapted from Edith Wharton’s unfinished (and then newly republished) novel. “We used to break for afternoon tea with scones with clotted cream and jam,” she says. “We were shooting in Castle Howard where they did Brideshead Revisited.” A long way from Pauly Shore. But Gugino, not even 25 by this point, couldn’t be pinned down.

“I was so afraid,” Gugino says. “Those are the areas where youth shows its face. You think you have to play according to the system in order to succeed. I remember it being a very bold decision that I thought, You know what? I’m not going to do that!”

At 27 years old, Gugino was cast last-minute to play the matriarch of the Spy Kids family. With the character’s kids being in the 9-12 age range, she was plainly too young to play the part. But Kelly Preston had to drop out, and Gugino says that Julianne Moore was also offered the job but wasn’t available, and Daryl Sabara—who played the youngest Spy Kid, Juni—personally requested Gugino after his twin brother acted alongside her in a Hallmark Christmas movie with Laura Dern. (Really.) She took the part and nailed it, Gugino’s maturity and looseness an ideal combination for director Robert Rodriguez’s zany tone. This witty $35 million–budgeted family movie yielded strong reviews, nearly $150 million in box-office gross, and several sequels. Her visibility skyrocketed—for good and ill.

“People thought I was much older than I was,” Gugino says. “George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon came a little bit later, but these sorts of people who were actually five years my senior that I would be acting opposite—we had to really fight because people were like, ‘She’s a little bit old for it.’” Hollywood’s sexist norm surely informed that dynamic too: “The idea of having someone who was even equal in age to the male character was a big deal then,” Gugino says. “Do I wonder sometimes if I had not done [Spy Kids], would people have not had that sort of maternal image of me at that time in my life? Would that have altered my choices? I think probably. But I’m also one of those people that doesn’t cry over spilt milk.”

In a way, Spy Kids still offered Gugino a glimpse of the career she envisioned back when she was a teenager. “I never sounded like an ingénue, even when I looked like one, and I never felt like one inside,” she says. “I felt that at 30 I was going to start getting the roles that I really wanted.” Indeed, in the 2000s, she zigged and zagged with the abandon of an actor with just enough recognizability to get in the room, and just enough anonymity to avoid getting comfortable. She became a Broadway regular in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall opposite Peter Krause and Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms with Brian Dennehy. She finally made it into Oscar-contending movies like American Gangster. And she started leading her own TV shows.

The Elmore Leonard adaptation Karen Sisco premiered in 2003 to critical acclaim on ABC—and an immediate sense that its gritty, complex aesthetic was a bit too HBO for the network television of the time. Previously, Gugino had adamantly resisted long-term production commitments. (“Seven years doing one thing? Help!”) But she fell hard for the show’s eponymous Deputy US Marshal. Her steely, sexy, dryly funny turn as Karen teased what she could pull off as a lead, but ABC canceled the drama after one season. “That one was really disappointing,” she says. Gugino top-lined another network drama in Threshold a few years later, but that sci-fi effort didn’t work with critics or audiences—again, it was done after a season. “The show we intended to make is not the show that we ultimately were able to make,” she says. “It would’ve been hard to continue making that show the way it was.”

Those one-and-dones might help explain Gugino’s turn toward supporting roles on cable hits: The no-bullshit Hollywood agent of Entourage, the scumbag-defending lawyer of Californication, the savvy reporter of Political Animals. And she added one more short-lived lead TV role to her resume, the juicy Cinemax vehicle Jett. (“Unfortunately, the network disappeared,” Gugino says of that show’s fate.) Here was risky, at times explicit material far beyond the confines of family entertainment. And that goes double, maybe, for the project that introduced her brilliant ongoing collaboration with Flanagan: the psychological thriller Gerald’s Game, in which Gugino’s Jessie is chained to a bed and forced to survive when her husband (who’d been enacting a stranger rape fantasy) dies of a heart attack.

The conceit turns surreal, demanding a staggering dual performance from Gugino. She barely had time to decide; the project was on the verge of falling apart by the time it got to her. “There’s nowhere to hide, literally or figuratively,” Gugino says; she’s in every frame of the film.

Her gifts have coalesced in Flanagan’s projects, his Netflix series giving her the treatment at last of a star. She’s devastating in 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House as the tormented matriarch, spooky as the wild narrator of The Haunting of Bly Manor. In last fall’s House of Usher, for which (along with The Girls on the Bus) Gugino is seeking her first Emmy nomination, she’s simply never been better. “It was probably a year before [we filmed] where Mike said, ‘I’m going to do a limited series that’s Edgar Allan Poe–influenced, and I think it would be really amazing if you would play the raven,’” Gugino says. “That was all I knew—and I said yes.”

Within that template, Gugino wore many hats: bartender, security guard, sex worker, chimpanzee. The grounded quality that’s been evident since her teenage years, from beloved broad sitcoms to dopey cult-classic films, now serves her equally well in this different strand of heightened entertainment. Gugino is always present, always honest, no matter the bizarre requirements of the story around her. She chews through Flanagan’s famed dense monologues with relish and a little wickedness. Her character in House of Usher, who goes by Verna, masterminds the series’ unfortunate events episode by episode, and Gugino precisely adopts the physicality of an ape for one of the murders (as inspired by Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”)—a premise that would sound ridiculous were it not both so scary and so darkly funny in the actor’s hands.

Between Jett, Flanagan’s work, and The Girls on the Bus, here are “the roles I’ve always wanted, to feel like, How can I come up to the plate and do service to this material? As opposed to, How do I fill in the thing that’s not really there?” Gugino says. “I hope that I can continue to scare myself creatively and do the things that I don’t know if I can pull off. That gets both harder and easier. It’s such a paradox as you get older.” Fortunately, in this actor’s case, things only seem to ripen with age.